Collection Over the Garden Wall

Over the Garden Wall is ten episodes long and is probably the best thing Cartoon Network has ever aired. Two half-brothers are lost in a wood called the Unknown, and the series unfolds like a collection of American folk tales that nobody quite remembers hearing.

The aesthetic is doing enormous work. It's drawn in the palette of nineteenth-century illustration and early Fleischer cartoons, all rust and amber, with a soundtrack of ragtime and old-time gospel. Everything about it feels recovered rather than made.

Wirt is an anxious teenager who narrates his own life pessimistically; Greg is a small boy with a frog and no fear at all. The contrast is funny for most of the runtime and then becomes the emotional argument of the finale.

The Beast is a genuinely frightening antagonist, and the reason is that he mostly just talks.

This collection covers Wirt, Greg and Beatrice. Watch it in October.