Cartoon Network show offers varied, creative installments with humor, action, pathos
Adventure Time has a reputation as a stoner’s or children’s show, a stew of psychedelic nonsense best enjoyed by the easy to please. While this reputation makes sense — it’s an offbeat, colorful cartoon that delights in weirdness, which makes it appointment viewing for those under the influence — it also does a disservice to what is one of most creative and diverse shows on television.
Set in the fantasy/post-apocalpytic Land of Ooo, Adventure Time began by following hero Finn the Human and his best friend Jake the Dog as they saved the innocent and fought the forces of evil, predominantly the scatterbrained creep Ice King.
However, as the show has developed, it has stretched the boundaries of its 11-minute episodic format as far as it can go. There are episodes where Finn and Jake go on adventures, but there are also episodes like the nearly silent “Shh!,” the detective sendup “Candy Streets,” and the surprisingly affecting Ice King dramatic piece “I Remember You.”
That’s part of the appeal of Adventure Time — it transforms from adventure to low-key comedy to drama from episode to episode, always experimenting with new formats and plotlines. It helps that the setting is vibrant and well-realized, the characters are endearing and the dialogue is snappily novel.
Take a quote from last night’s “Bad Timing,” from valley girl pastiche Lumpy Space Princess’s new beau Johnny: “When this evening started, I was feeling so dump trucks. Now it’s like a hundred forklifts!”
“Bad Timing” is an excellent example of the show’s experimental structure, framing the whole episode in a center circle as small creatures danced about on the trippy, angular margins. Princess Bubblegum has invented a time travel device that actually just scans matter and can reform it to a previous state at will, and LSP doesn’t understand how it works. After a sweet, understated romance with fellow lumpy space person Johnny, LSP develops a jealous rage and tries to send him back in time to when they first met. However, LSP never scanned him, and he’s sent into the unknown. A tearful LSP is then teleported back to when she never met Johnny by Princess Bubblegum, who is often the source of moral relativism on the show. On the margins, Johnny pops up, revealing the outer edges of the screen to be a sort of nothingspace purgatory.
That the show could rustle up a dark romance story out of nowhere and make it work so well is a testament to its confident, innovative storytelling. Far from a mere colorful diversion for children and potheads, Adventure Time has blossomed into a creative breeding ground for new forms of storytelling and character work … in an 11-minute cartoon.
Also, the character named Princess Bubblegum is the show’s source of moral relativism. How cool is that?