Posts Tagged Comedy
Back to Writing! The Mighty Ones and Monsters At Work
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Television, Uncategorized, Writing on August 6, 2021
Well, perhaps not a new me. But a new world? Absolutely.
It’s been a while since I’ve even touched this site. To say I’ve been incredibly busy is an understatement. I managed to acquire two actual, genuine writing gigs for animated shows (and always looking for more!), but as the COVID pandemic swept–and continues to sweep–across the nation, my attention had been primarily focused on more visual arts. I’d dabbled in Resolve, After Effects, Unity, and Blender. I did more exercise. I wrote a bit more for The AVClub and Den of Geek. I’ve certainly kept busy, but most of my time has been focused on keeping healthy. This pandemic, as been mentioned several times on social media, has been hell for mental health: trauma, paranoia, ignorance, fear, and outright hostility has become the norm. So, it’s been nigh impossible to really… “get” into a mindset that’s feels appropriate to think about, and write about, cartoons and animation.
This isn’t to say that I haven’t been watching them, though. In fact, I’ve been watching a ton of them, partly because I have to, partly as a means to keep up with the sheer number of new animated shows that’s been dropping on Netflix, Hulu, Nick, Disney, CN, and HBO Max. It’s an onslaught, and for the most part, nothing has been terrible, but I have yet to truly apply any of the robust analytical thinking I used to towards them. I want to get back to that. I want to return to those deep dives, those off-kilter, academic rambles that made this blog a “bit” popular at its small but notable peak. There’s certainly a lot to discuss, and over the next few weeks (months?) I’m hoping to play a little catch up with all the shows I’ve seen.
The plan, as of now, is to present a more informal blog/journal where I mostly talk about the thoughts I have about the cartoons I’m watching. While I’ll still be a bit analytical and all, I think this will best be handle with more of a casual flair, to get my writing juices flowing again, to see if I can foster some non-angry discussion about what’s on the air these days. There’s not gonna be any rhyme or reason to what I talk about, at least for the first couple of weeks: I’m gonna let whatever animated show I feel like discussing flow through my brain and vomit onto the page.
So, let’s just get to it.
The Mighty Ones is dumb. I mean this as a compliment. The show stars four moronic talking, anthropomorphic objects in nature (a rock, a leaf, a twig, and a berry) fumbling about in a yard own by three women who are equally, if not more so, moronic. Stupidity thrives on this show, the dumbness and confusion structured to maximize laughs and cringe, tinged with the kind of weird and absurd energy that thrived in many post-Spongebob cartoons in the late 2000s, early 2010s. In the very first episode, Rocksy, Twig, Leaf, and Berry don’t know what a “game” is. Later, they talk about, and play, all the dumb games they randomly make up. (Continuity is not a thing here.) It’s cutely funny at times, although the idiocy of the first season can be overwhelming, with an energy that posits throwing as much dumbness at the wall and seeing what sticks. This doesn’t quite make for a binge-able show, but watching one or two episodes at a time is workable. More specifically, it seems to me that the show struggled the most with Leaf. He’s Twig’s brother, but aside from a early benevolent moment in the first season, he treats Twig like shit and mostly plays an arrogant prick. He’s mean, but not really in a funny way. His actions and behavior isolates him from the cast, making him unable to establish a comical rapport among the characters; instead of being a sour, self-centered character communicating with everyone else within the show’s rhythms, Leaf mostly was the guy who couldn’t grasp “Yes and…” and ruined a lot of comic momentum.
So didn’t really surprise me to notice Leaf being mostly absent in season two, which also had the added benefit of bringing in more outside characters into the mix (Leaf–in addition to calming him down a bit, making him a bit more pathetic, and having him speak more comic asides–mostly spends a lot of time gone or in the background.) The Mighty Ones isn’t a particularly deep show, but the sparse, barely populated feel of the yard felt limited, where the idiocy was a function of pure, isolated boredom–just something to do. Season two feels… well, not “purposeful,” but “fuller,” where the four main characters and their actions now can function in something that could plausibly be defined as “a world”. It pushes a comic energy where the dumbness had more to work with, a dumbness in a dumb world, where everyone now competes for… I guess, maximum dumbness. This also has the darkly-relating result of a more fatalist season; characters are placed in absolute harm’s way. The first season was dumb in a silly way; season two very notably has its moronic characters damn near die or killed. Leaf wastes away to barely nothing, Twig is skinned and chewed on repeatedly, and Berry falls in love with a crow that viscously peaks and eats at her fruity, gushy head. The last episode has the crew swallowed by a snake, and… living within the belly, I suppose. With the dark energy of a final episode, they way goodbye to their friends from within the eye of the snake that swallowed them as the snake slithers off into the distance. The Mighty Ones is a tricky show to wrap around; towards the end, I found myself more enjoying the three dim-witted homeowners who thrive in an entirely warped reality that ended up being hilarious. I don’t want to dismiss the antics of the main cast though, even if the show overall never quite snapped into place, which, to be fair, seemed to be the point.
As much as I’d like to discuss more cartoons further, I think I’ll end on a few words on the Disney+ animated show Monsters At Work. A friend of mine once remarked that Pixar films are incredible, amazing films that are best watched once; while I don’t think I’d subscribe to that sentiment full tilt, I do understand that it sort of represents a kind of limitation to the Pixar formula. It seems to have reached its limit with Soul and the assortment of weaker, clumsier sequels churned out by the studio recently; now, imagine that formula chopped up, squeezed, and broken down into 25-minute chunks, and you’d have Pixar’s first foray into animated television.
Again, Monsters At Work isn’t bad. In fact, it’s past three episodes have been a step up from its first three, as the cast starts to feel more interactive with each other, and, more crucially, the lead monster takes on a more active role. The first three episodes mostly has Tyler being a bit clumsy but mostly brushing aside his new coworkers as said coworkers cluelessly quip and praise each other around them. It struggled to work because no one was actually talking to each other? Tyler kept saying specific things that no one would respond to, making the show a bit frustrating watch. There was no interplay among the characters. It also put a bit more emphasis on Mike and Sully who are clearly phoning it in (Goodman more so than Crystal, but both of them really sound like they’re doing their VO work while lying in bed).
But when “The Big Wazowskis” comes around, a shift notably occurs. Tyler takes a more active, if sitcom-lazy, role, which really showcases how pathetic and (slightly) self-absorbed he is. Admittedly, if he started off like that, I could see that leaving a bad taste in viewers mouths, but at the very least Tyler now has a personality that’s more than “knocked-around”. In a desperate attempt to nab Mike’s attention, Tyler distracts his irritating coworkers and their bowling desires and brings in a much better group of bowlers. It’s pretty funny to watch Tyler’s flop-sweat work at a more active level than passive, which also allows for a tad bit more poignancy to the events when he’s caught. “The Cover Up” is even funnier, where Tyler is directly pitted up “against” Duncan (the conflict is one-sided, in that Duncan’s hostility towards Tyler is never reciprocated) but still are often forced to work together to solve problems that they cause. In this episode, there’s a tinge of American Dad nuttiness, where an inspector arrives to shut them down, but Tyler and Duncan knock him out, then try to get rid of the body. Monsters At Work still has issues, mostly stemming from the core premise–monsters working to make children laugh via a bureaucratic infrastructure that recently switched from scares has too many open-ended questions (Why aren’t adult laughs as effective? What does a society driven on scare/laugh power look like? Are there other organizations that do this?) that makes a unstable foundation. But a sillier, more flippant narrative to everything could help. And honestly? They should drop Sully and Mike if they continue to be so lackluster, especially the “Mike’s Comedy Class” bit.
Next week I’m going to share my thoughts on Jellystone and The Owl House I think! We shall see. But thanks for checking back into this blog, and I do hope to continue this for the next couple of weeks!
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.
The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps: “The Quest” and “The Spoon”
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Television, The Amazing World of Gumball Recaps, Writing on August 28, 2017
The Amazing World of Gumball Season 1 Episode… by gumball-amazing
“The Quest” – A-
This may be the first episode of The Amazing World of Gumball where the show brings in that raw emotional honesty that I’ve been harping about for the past few reviews. It’s not the full, jaw-dropping dramatic revelations that will come later, but “The Quest” seems like the first episode to explore its characters a bit deeper than a bunch of computer-animated figures in a ridiculous cartoon world. A lot of Gumball’s narrative strengths really come together here – its jokes, its pacing, its slick, smart visuals, and its heart. The first time you saw Tina the dinosaur, it was a joke – a giant, female dinosaur as the school bully, literally and metaphorically (at least at this point in the show). In a surprising move, we get a bit of insight into her and her life. I don’t know how many people were expecting to then see Tina sleeping on a literal pile of trash in the middle of a dumpster; Anais says it’s really sad, but “sad” really doesn’t cover it.
It takes a bit of set up to get to that point, but it’s endearing to watch. A few kids tease Anais by tossing her beloved doll, Daisy, around, and Anais demands/guilts Gumball into getting it back for her (for good reason – Gumball brought the toy onto the bus in the first place!). The Amazing World of Gumball will deal with this sibling interplay quite a bit. The Gumball/Darwin bond will always be front and center, but the Gumball/Anais relationship is a prickly one, bouncing between affection, neglect, manipulation, altercations, and forgiveness. It’s in effect a deeply exaggerated form of older brother/younger sister relationships, heightened even more by Gumball’s selfishness and determination, and Anais’ brilliance and loneliness. But “The Quest” shows that it’s a relationship that’s, underneath all that, built on love and family loyalty: Gumball yelling out “That’s why you don’t mess with the Wattersons!” at the end is truer and more significant than we realize at this point.
Gumball reluctantly agrees to help his sister, which has him running around the school trying to get Daisy back. We get some quick introductions to some other classmates: Hector, the giant, and Juke, the walking boombox (the future episodes involving these two are something, particularly Juke’s episode, but we’ll get to that). The build up during the early scenes are just so good – just an easy confidence that makes everything seem so effortless. I have to admit, rewatching these episodes make me kind of miss the low-key narrative build-ups that the more recent batch of episodes lack. And throughout it all are all the kind of sibling manipulations and control techniques that we’ve seen before, given a bit of heft that only Gumball can muster. Gumball and Anais battle over using big-cute-eyes faces and guilt-trapping passive-aggressiveness. Gumball provides a fake Daisy doll only for it to explode. Gumball tries to use his inability to catch against himself, only for him to actually catch the doll, to which he immediately tosses off to Darwin (I also love how his inability to catch is telegraphed early as a weird visual gag when he’s unable to snag the doll in the air after Hector flicks it of his buttock). Gumball is a dick of a brother. But he is committed to his sister (and, in the overall scheme of the show, whatever’s on his mind) in a way that keeps him from being intolerable. And the show itself is keenly away of his awfulness (unlike some other shows).
The entire final section is worth talking about though. From the reveal of Tina literally sleeping on trash, to the hilarious attempts to getting the doll from her grasp, to the phenomenal Jurassic Park-esque chase sequence that follows, “The Quest” takes a big step forward in its commitment to the visuals and aesthetics of a scene versus just establishing various signifiers of the parody. The slow fade in and camera dolly that opens up with the kids staring into Tina’s room/warehouse; the bleak, dreary atmosphere in which the scant lighting only adds to the horror; the dynamic camera angles and change-of-directions of the characters as they give chase and get chased – the level of details is a step further than the already great chase back in “The DVD” (and props to the physical interaction between the 2D-flat Watterson characters and the 3D-rendered dinosaur; that in itself is impressive gold). The parody is clear but “The Quest” is clearer that the kids are in real danger. And despite all that, when they finally stop Tina and gloat, the show pulls back and reveal Tina to be a broken, poor bully who never had a toy before. It’s a sudden switch, especially since you don’t expect Gumball to “go there,” but it’s heart-breaking even this early in the show’s run. There’s more to the Tina story, and we’ll definitely get to that, but we now know that Gumball will bring more to its cast of characters than stock tropes, and what they reveal about Tina will allow them to explore its cast and world even more, and believe me, it’s a trip.
“The Spoon” – B
Right of the bat, you can tell the animation in “The Spoon” is different. I don’t know if the animation studio was different, or if a different director was in charge here, but there’s an intense exaggeration to the expressions and the energy that isn’t as specifically channelled through something familiar – like a parody or what we’ve seen before. Once again, Gumball is utilizing a cartoon trope to springboard into a different story – but like “The End,” it’s just another cartoon trope. In this case, it’s the father forgetting his wife’s birthday and needing to find a gift, but it’s tossed aside for a nutty adventure involving Gumball and Darwin mistaking a thief for a CEO for charity for bald people. “The Spoon” undercuts all of that by more or less ditching that first trope (once Nicole comes home, Richard comes clean about the forgotten gift almost immediately), by contextualizing the second trope in a dangerous way (Gumball and Darwin are sent to a gas station in what is implied is a dangerous part of town), and by bringing in a heavily over-the-top animation style for most of the episode. When Richard hilariously reminds the kids of their mother’s birthday, only to realize he forgot her gift, his expressions and body language goes absolutely bonkers, in a way never quite matched in previous episodes, and we’re off to the races.
Really, “The Spoon” is a B- episode in overall quality. The jokes are kind of bland, being as trapped as it is in those tropes, and no amount of undercutting or subverting can overcome it. The only thing that stands out is the animation, with some impressive movements and facial expressions being pushed in wildly insane ways, and a final chase sequence that goes all over the place (Gumball just does chase sequences and action so well, I would love to see this team do an action series at some point). Gumball, Darwin, and the fingerprint thief make as many ridiculous expressions as Richard does, there’s some judicious use of emoticon faces throughout (Gumball doesn’t use them often), and even that final sequenced with Gumball and Darwin riding a flying air tank was fantastically well done, if not exactly a new, original, or inspired animated bit.
But it’s a funny bit, and really just a lot of fun to watch. At this point, Gumball and Darwin are still functionally, mentally children, clueless to the kind of world they live in and the kind of nasty characters that populate it. The Amazing World of Gumball in some ways will revisit the idea of the playful, innocent children suddenly brushing up a real threat and dealing with the fall out – that episode ends with Nicole exacting delicious revenge on the culprit as well – but while that episode is a bit more… existential, “The Spoon” caters to a Nickelodeon, “kids rules” approach. Once Darwin and Gumball realizes they’re in trouble, they manage to run and escape the spoon-wielding criminal, while also besting with a series of Home Alone-esque traps. This episode also introduces Doughnut Sheriff, a stereotypical baffoonish cop who is literally a doughnut, but like all the other characters, he too will be contextualized and explored more than the ineffectual goofball he is here. “The Spoon” is a fine episode, propped up by its visual silliness, but it is a slight in the overall flow of the show.