Archive for category The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps
The Dragon Prince is on the same troubling journey as its protagonists
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps, Uncategorized, Writing on February 19, 2020
By the final few episodes of season three of The Dragon Prince, a number of disparaging, distant characters have gathered together to fight off a giant army of soldiers, all of whom have transformed into raging, hostile creatures. The main characters have been at odds with each other in various degrees, mostly due to confusion over true end goals and disinformation/misinformation generated to manipulate people like chess pieces or prevent hurt feelings, but by the end, they come together in a slightly uneasy alliance to protect the great dragon and its egg/child from this horde–particularly its leader, Viren, who has become grotesquely corrupted by a literal magical monster in his ear. The battle is intense, the kind of close-knit battle that crusts and wanes with intensity and tension, near catastrophic failures opening up amazing moments of tide-turning successes. It’s as complete and rewarding as any endgame battle should be.
It’s also clearly not where The Dragon Prince wanted to go.
It’s unclear if there’s going to be a fourth season of The Dragon Prince. Its third season ends with a mysterious cliffhanger of sorts, but for all intents and purposes, all the major narratives seem to have been closed (not to mention a very contentious and serious issue behind the scenes). But the events of the first two seasons very much purported something grander and more epic in scope, a tale originally gathered to tell a more expansive, Game of Thrones-esque narrative. Animated shows have been trying to “go” Game of Thrones for a while now, with limited success. All Hail King Julian had one season of a Game of Throne parody which was rather restrictive in their fairly loose, family absurd comedy voice. Star Vs. The Forces of Evil didn’t go full Game of Thrones but had lofty ambitions that fell far, far short. Amphibia, which asks for an analysis on its own, couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a tale of misguided warring factions or an episodic comedy of weird yet potent friendships; its second season plans to send its cast on a traveling mission across the land of Wartwood. This, mind you, is what Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventures did in its second season, which was both fine and clunky: fine in the sense it was still fun, entertaining, and intriguing, but clunky in that its cast often felt stuck in one place for too long, and the various encounters and characters they went up against were too fleeting to be particularly memorable (and, perhaps most unfortunately, Rapunzel’s struggle through her trauma took a very definitive backseat). Its current season immediately snapped them back to Corona in the time it took to do a song cure; All Hail made a pointed self-aware joke about the process, immediately opting to go back to its original episodic-is structure.
The Dragon Prince also, very clearly, had lofty goals. Its basic concept was easy enough on the surface: hostilities between humans and elves had reached an uneasy truce, but when the act of one particular human upsets a dragon–the destruction of its egg–all hell starts to break loose. It’s revealed early on that the egg was only taken, not destroyed, but the course of returning it can’t stop the drumbeat of war. Well… that’s what was supposed to happen. Similar to Ned Stark’s attempt to find out what happened to regarding the “death” Jon Arryn, which led to his beheading and the floodgates of absolute war and madness, The Dragon Prince seemed to chart its narrative on how two outsiders of an inevitable clash coped when their goal completely failed to match up against the drive for bloodlust, revenge, and misplaced justice. The driver of this was Viren, a misguided and hostile assistant to the late king whose death has him lashing out and desperate for revenge against the elves who killed him (rich in queer subtext, FYI). In just a few episodes, things escalate, fights are fought, dragons mess about, magic is casted, and so forth. It’s most telling moment was in season two, in which Viren has to convince a roundtable of human leaders to march on the elves, and he almost convinces them – save for one person, a kid. Her refusal to abide to his whims enrages him, doubly so when it convinces everyone else to back down as well. There was a sense that the show was going to really get in-depth here, with conflicting human lands responding to the threat (or non-threat) in different ways. To further that, Viren gets gradually corrupted by some kind of mysterious creature in a magic mirror; Ezran, upon learning his father is dead, departs from his crew to return home to try and rule.
But inside all those developments, there were some, what you may call, red flags. For one, Viren’s gradual corruption by that mysterious figure, whose name is Aaravos, took way too many episodes to get to its point. We also never learn much about that figure, other than he’s angry and is “in some kind of captivity” but with no context on what this even means (again, this seems like a development that was intended to reveal itself over time, but it never reveals enough for audiences to be curious or care). The corruption arc also brings up another issue: the show’s portrayal and execution of its magicks have been somewhat baffling, consisting of profound and wonderous special effects, but a severe lack of weight, or purpose, or logic, or consistency. I know that magic isn’t supposed to “make sense,” but also, did we need to see a mysterious bug sew creepy and grotesque webs inside Viren’s eye in order to see the projection of Aaravos? Callum’s magic cube possesses access to six Primal Sources of Magic, but we only see Callum’s execution of the Sky magic. The other five never pop up, or more specifically, they never pop up to the point that they should matter. I’m not even sure they even exist.
The Dragon Prince struck me as a show whose ambitions were larger than its narrative acumen, and perhaps its ratings limitations, could take it. It’s characters, marred within the dark, far-reaching depths of plans, ideologies, and temperaments that needed time to grow and function, had been hindered by many things, but in particular, its struggle to find its comic voice. The use of comedy in The Dragon Prince often felt like a desperate stretch to make its characters come off likable and appealing, but the kind of jokes told through its characters often hurt their characterization more than helped. Nothing exemplified this more than Rayla. Introduced as a fledgling assassin who grew doubts when confronted with her first kill, Rayla’s character shifted from a dark, conflicted character to a talented, plucky teenager, and the transformation created some real whiplash. It became impossible to square the intro of Rayla with the later iteration of her, one where she nearly came close to killing the king, to the one who skipped around town pretending to be a human, sprouting the kind of “haha humans amirite” jokes that could only be written by a writer.
It’s clumsy and awkward, but most of the jokes are. Some work by sheer design, mostly through Soren, who’s meathead goofiness is inherent in his character, which lets his clumsiness and/or idiocy comes across cutely amusing, but essentially part of his nature. (I especially love when his lack of intelligence stun characters into stuttering repose, struggling to explain themselves to him.) Other time they feel stilted, awkward, and kind of tasteless. One character remains weirdly blithe to his captor after being held in captivity for weeks, even months, as indicated by the growth of stubble on his face overtime. A mystical elf woman who teaches/guides Callum, Rayla, and Ezran also bursts out moments of silliness. Late in season three, there is not one but two “Sailor Moon transformation” visual jokes, but they’re so incongruent to the show’s overall vibe that they come off garish more than comical.
When The Dragon Prince works, it does work, mostly with its backstories and tales of the events of how its characters got to the tense and harrowing point of where they are today (a narrative tact taken with the humans, but curiously not with the elves). Yet it’s current story feels hamstrung, a bit meandering, and uncomfortable with how best to tell its story, both long-term and episodically. A good example is in the third season premiere, “Sol Regem.” Callum and Rayla have to sneak past a massive yet blind dragon, but the logistics of the story’s beats are clumsy. Callum supposedly has a wicked body odor that the dragon can sense (revealed in a pretty forced gag), but his odor doesn’t become a significant part of the story until late in the episode. Presumably the dragon would have been able to smell him earlier in the episode, but for some reason he doesn’t. It’s just wonky and sloppy, and really makes the tension of the moment confusing and less exciting. I also felt as if Ezran’s return to run Katolis, only for the plot machinations that allowed him to return to Callum and Ezran four episodes later (two of which have him sitting alone in prison), felt rushed and narratively shaky at best.
But it’s also a pretty representative beat of the show at large, a kind of broadly-scoped adventure that struggles in the smaller details, which wouldn’t be a problem if that broad scope was more tightly plotted, if the comic moments were stronger, if the characters were more consistent, and/or if the episodic stories were more significant. The Dragon Prince has all the potential in the world to a driven, harrowing, intriguing, and entertaining show, but it feels too beholden by a broader, 2000s-era kids-cable-network sensibility that no longer seems to apply, especially on Netflix. It doesn’t need to be darker or more violent. It ought to be bolder with its choices in how its characters and its world are warped and shaped by the confusion dangers around them, in the shifting loyalties and morally ambiguous decisions that need to be made. The third season suggests the show may be better off just telling a straight-forward adventure, with one main villain and one set of heroic characters out to stop them. We’ll see if that questionable fourth season makes the change.
The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps: “The Laziest” and “The Ghost”
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Television, The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps, Writing on September 18, 2017
The Amazing World of Gumball S01E06 The Laziest… by Yu-Gi-Oh-the-offical
“The Laziest” – C+
I mentioned this in my last review, but The Amazing World of Gumball will struggle mightily with Richard, perhaps longer than it feels like it should. Richard is the early Homer Simpson, the proto-Peter Griffin: the fat, lazy slob who will only push himself when absolutely necessary or confronted with an absolute obstacle. One of Gumball’s smarted, most slyly cleaver developments will be an adjustment of gender roles. Nicole will lean more on the breadwinner, bill-paying, nine-to-five position, while Richard will be the caretaker and the stay-at-home dad (in incredibly broad terms; the show will blur these lines when the episode calls for it). Right now though, Richard is the laziest person in all of Elmore, and he’s willing to stake a WHOLE WEEK OF CHORES on it.
It’s a fine, if weak, character beat to lean on this early in the show’s run. There have been some bits of character ideas and depth even this early in, but “Richard as the lazy and whiny butt of all jokes” is how they defined the patriarchal pink rabbit, and they’ll utilize that characterization for… perhaps a few seasons longer than necessary. Here, after semi-conning Gumball and Darwin to taking out the trash – a responsibility that was given to him by Nicole – Richard begins a series of competition with his kids concerning the extent of his laziness. First they compete in keeping up with Richard’s unwillingness to move from the couch, then they try to recruit Larry to engage in his past laziness to take their father on. And it’s all fine, cute, and occasionally funny. Yet considering what the show will become – and even compared to the few episodes that we’ve seen so far – it feels all so unnecessary, just a series of gags in which The Amazing World of Gumball takes the lazy dad trope to its extreme.
Except it’s really not to any extreme at all (Gumball will try this idea multiple times throughout the run, and I’d be hard pressed to think of any of them that actually works). The only really inspired, and semi-dark, sequence is the extended scenes in which Gumball and Darwin continually berate and annoy Larry into engaging in their lazy-off with their father, if only due to the insane, wildly-cartoonish ways the episode handles it all. Gumball and Darwin appear in increasingly ridiculous places as their cries of “Please do it, Larry!” become a comically hellish mantra, triggering Larry to lash out at a costumer and his wife, costing him his job and his wife (he loses his car when he leaps out if, unable to escape the sights and sounds of the Watterson boys as well). Larry indeed goes back into his “Lazy Larry” state, but is so lazy that he doesn’t bother with helping the kids. It’s delightfully ironic, an entire bit that the show itself basically declare is a waste of time.
The ironic bits are the strongest elements in the episode – including the bit above, and the also the dick move that Richard pulls at the end. He jumps out of his lethargic state right before Nicole comes home, and she blames the kids for overworking the father while they’re the ones that seem lazy. And that’s… fine, but with no other narrative or thematic to hook that twist with, the end just feels like a mean ironic twist for the sake of it. It feels like the episode is just trying to see if they could get away with that kind of twist, but it doesn’t really add to anything, comedy or story-wise. There is one small bit that worth noting though – the two brief bits that “anthropomorphize” Gumball’s insides, when he’s hopped on sugar and when the subsequent crash hits. Gumball will use both anthropomorphism, exaggerated internal shots, and other cartoonishly perfect metaphors to represent the characters physical and mental states, and this is the first of a long line of brilliant visuals that the show will utilize. There’s elements in this episode that work, but beyond that it’s inessential.
The Ghost – A-
I’m surprised that something as wild and dynamic as “The Ghost” appeared so early in season one. I would have thought this was a late season one, early season two episode. The boldness and specificity of the episode is striking. Hints of body image and dysmorphia, of consent, insecurity, and lack of both underline this episode with quiet but startling clarity. It never quite hones in on any of those topics, but it does brush against them lightly, while also shedding some light into Carrie and exploring the extent of the specificities of the characters. It already did this with Tina, a poor girl who is a dinosaur and lives on garbage and lashes out via bullying, and now it’ll do something similar with Carrie, a young ghost girl who never tasted food or even had a body (the show won’t explain how she died, which is for the best). The show’s gradual development and focus on those classmates will continue with some fantastic episodes, but for now, we’re pretty much on Gumball’s second outing on this approach.
But back to the first point, about the body image and dysmorphia, consent, and insecurity: all those elements are there in the inciting incident of this episode. Carrie envies Gumball and Darwin’s ability to eat and enjoy food, so Gumball allows Carrie to possess his body so she can experience taste again. Well, that’s not quite what happens. Really, Darwin for some reason mentions that Gumball would be totally receptive to having his body possesses, and Gumball clearly is uncomfortable with it. This probably the most “antagonistic” Darwin will be portrayed as, in which his general kindness and naivety is forced upon others. It’s a bit of a manipulation, although one Darwin isn’t often aware of: since he’s nice, then listening to him will result in nice things too. Of course, that’s a clear problem here. Gumball doesn’t want to, you know, lose control of his whole sense of autonomy, but he reluctantly accepts under the guises of being Darwin-nice.
What results is some hilarious and wildly insane bedlam. Carrie’s possession of Gumball is both creepy and hilarious, resulting in a wild, Go-Pro-POV, sped-up shot of possessed-Gumball going on a vicious binge of eating endless amounts of food. It’s a remarkable series of animated bit, both exhilarating and disturbing, especially when it leaves Gumball waking up in a pile of trash with hazy recollections of what happened. The Amazing World of Gumball often skirts that perfect line between comedy and discomfort, and it’s fascinating to see the show really working to emphasize this – from Darwin’s misguided understanding of what it means to be nice, to the desperation Gumball goes to weasel out of it (per his father’s advice), and in particular how the most pointed advice – just saying no (per his mother) – grows into legit danger when Carrie doesn’t accept it.
“The Ghost” has a number of various lines that get hit the point with very little nuance. Richard laughing at a bloated Gumball, only to realize he himself rocks a muffintop, cries, “It’s only funny when it happens to someone else’s body!” which is a direct critique of easy weight-related jokes. Gumball voices a sincerity when he mentions Carrie having “a real problem,” and the loss of what to do about this creates a tension that in itself rivals the back and forth that occurs between Gumball and Carrie, both outside and inside his body. Yet as disturbing as all this is, “The Ghost” doesn’t seem to delve into the full, dark, volatile nature of what exactly is happening. It touches upon all the awkward ways people can manipulate and control others, and also how weight, body image, and dysmorphia can be damaging, but it keeps things on the comic side (which is fine, and preferable at this stage in season one), but it never quite brings those two points together. The ending, in which Carrie just possesses Richard instead, undercuts the depth of the topics in the wrong ways, and even though the show is aware of the irony of the ending (Darwin’s “Another happy ending” declaration is clear), the fleeting nature of the humor overpowers the seriousness of the events. No matter. The Amazing World of Gumball is still testing the waters. It’ll be diving into those topics with full force soon enough.
The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps: “The Pressure” and “The Painting”
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Television, The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps, Writing on September 4, 2017
The Amazing World Of Gumball S01E05 The… by Yu-Gi-Oh-the-offical
“The Pressure” – B
In previous reviews, I mentioned missing the more low-key, easy-going pacing of the early seasons of The Amazing World of Gumball, but I have to admit that what I really miss is the childish interplay between the school kids. A lot. As The Amazing World of Gumball gets more satirical, poignant, direct, bold, and ambitious, it does begin to move away from this particular dynamic of its school kids being school kids – gossipy, confused, bossy, embarrassed, silly, immature, and awkward. Gumball will do a series of episodes that focus on each individual character in the class – a remarkably simple idea that not even The Simpsons has done – but it will sacrifice a lot of the specifics of the classroom setting as it reaches for loftier goals. Those goals are indeed worthwhile, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but these straight-forward, low-key, classmates-being-classmates stories are pretty fun in themselves.
I somewhat get why the made the move away from it though: Masami is usually the progenitor for the conflict, who is introduced here as the stuck-up, manipulative “mean girl” who always wants to be the best and have everything go her way. I will have a lot to say about Masami in the future. For right now though, it’s good enough to notice that she’s the one who takes “control” of the treehouse situation, changing the topic of conversation from the design of the treehouse to boys, and, in order to one-up the various girls’ make-believe boyfriends, sets her sights on Darwin and “forces” him to be her boyfriend. It’s really because she knows he’s easy to work, using her feminine wiles and his panicky sensitivity to maintain an appearance of them dating, just to win that first kiss. It’s all silly, basic stuff, but it’s the show’s easy-going, confident nature that keeps the episode moving.
At this point in the show, the Gumball/Penny relationship (or, more accurately, burgeoning relationship) is a bit of a weak point. Gumball being goofy and nervous in front of Penny has been one thing – the generic awkwardness of a young crush – but here, it feels like a lot of that awkwardness is forced to the side, such that Gumball and Penny come together relatively easily (and, even weirder, without a single other person, girl or boy, really saying anything about their mutual crush). This is mainly done so that it can lead to the point where Gumball and Darwin kiss each other unknowingly, off-screen, but that’s a flat resolution, especially since we don’t see it, and especially after “The Dress,” which really up’d the grossness of a Gumball/Darwin “connection,” way beyond what a kiss would do.
There are some other flaws here too. Darwin needing to come up for air in the pool is just a straight-up writer’s mistake. That Gumball, Darwin, and Tobias are on some kind of friendly-speaking level feels sudden, and while The Amazing World of Gumball is generally on-and-off with how Tobias and Gumball relate, seeing this so soon after “The Third” creates a weird whiplash feeling. The show is still in an “episodic” mode, so there’s some leeway here (The Amazing World of Gumball actively subverts ideas of episodic vs. serialized storytelling; in fact, it subverts and deconstructs storytelling in a whole bunch of ways, but we’re not quite at that point), but it still feels a bit off. Still, “The Pressure” makes the ridiculousness of the situation clear: the whole boys vs. girls dilemma is portrayed as stupid as it is merely by having Tobias and Banana Joe the “villains”. The strained writing and lack of a bigger “point” really holds it back. (I should mention that there is one section that feels a bit sharp: when Rocky mentions how when he opens up to women, this causes them to runaway. It’s a pretty brief but dark reveal, a shade of Gumball’s cynicism skills, but it’s really set up to contrast how other shows uses simplistic “just tell her how you feel!” advice to solve its problems. Here, Musami just manipulates the situation further. Gumball can be, and will be, more sincere and optimistic, but it will not suffer fools lightly – characters will have to commit to that mindset for the show to accept it.)
The Painting – A
And that’s pretty much what they do in “The Painting,” the first fantastic, fully-committed episode of The Amazing World of Gumball’s first season. It’s not a perfect episode. It’s a bit clunky at times, and some of the individual stories feel a bit out of whack, but Gumball’s first season’s inconsistency is actually used to its advantage here. Underneath all the hemming and hawing, the insanity and wacky behavior, Gumball does believe in an authenticity – a true affection towards its central family, despite its broken, dysfunctional nature. And what makes this work is that Anais is indeed being honest here, but also that The Wattersons aren’t simply an anomaly of brokenness. The Amazing World of Gumball makes it clear that the various characters in the world of the show are just as broken, ridiculous, and shitty as our central family, so who the hell are these random people to say how this family should be? Everyone has to live through the same nutty, cartoony world that makes or breaks these characters, and that makes “right, wholesome living” impossible.
There’s quite a lot going on in this episode, and those depths are along the outskirts, just underneath the surface if you know where to look. You’ll notice how Principal Brown immediately comes to the worst conclusion of Anais’ home life after seeing her painting, perhaps a commentary on how school officials overreact to student’s artistic and creative outputs. You’ll notice the constant dismissals of Anais’ objections, which feels both ageist and sexist – that the very creator of the artwork is never given a chance to explain herself. This is also supported by the general idea that Anais is the gifted one in the family, the smartest one with the best chance of success, yet for some reason her work is “art-splained” by others. Yeah, there’s a sense that the environment that Anais lives in may not be the most supportive of her gifts, but honestly, neither is the Amazing World itself. Gumball will do a lot of great work developing Anais, and the reactions to her and her abilities, but the fact that the show is already doing great work this early on provides it a stable foundation to build upon.
For Anais to thrive, Brown more or less guilts The Watterson into becoming a better family, but while we know that’s doomed to fail, we get to see why and how. Not everything is The Wattersons’ fault. Take for instance Richard’s story, who can’t even get through the automated door. It causes him to be late, and he’s immediately fired. Richard has absolutely no desire to work – he screams at Brown for nearly a minute at the mere suggestion – but he will do it for his daughter. That he failed isn’t so much because he’s too stupid to do it; it’s because the “world” literally is preventing him. Think this is an exaggeration? They make this entirely literal in a future episode, and oh boy will we get to that – but for now, understand that despite Richard’s idiocy and laziness, he does try. (In all honestly, The Amazing World of Gumball will have some… problems in how to make Richard work a lot story-wise, and we’ll talk about that a lot too when that comes up.)
Nicole’s story is, admittedly, a bit bland. It makes sense for her as a character, at this point in the show at least, a reflection of her prowess as the homemaker and the breadmaker, although I don’t think it’s clear that Nicole is the only one paying the bills at this point. She destroys the house partly to give her something to do after cleaning it to a spit-shine, and partly because she’s going crazy after being so bored with her situation of domesticity. (Gumball will push that point further later on.) The Mr. Small/Gumball/Darwin storyline splits the middle, with a number of soft but amusing bits in which Small tries to get the boys to focus their anger energy into different outlets, despite them not making sense or actually hurting the kids. The interpretive dance stuff is nonsensical, although Darwin is won over by it, and the paint scene is hilarious if only because the paint actually gets into the boys’ eyes. Mr. Small is an overwrought, ridiculous hippie character, but at the very least a portion of what he teaches does work, so he’s not wholly useless. The entire endeavor is useless, though: Anais finally gets to speak her mind, and she reveals that while, yes, her family has serious issues, she loves them unconditionally. And it’s sappy, but it’s earnest, and even she gets to join in the chaos of dysfunction as part of the Wattersons unit. Principal Brown may not understand it, but it’s not up to him. Anais is happy, and the Wattersons are happy, and that’s what matters.