Gaining Faith in Cartoon Network Again: An Over the Garden Wall Review

There was a time when I enjoyed watching television. The internet has almost anything you’d like to watch, but that wasn’t why I stopped watching cable. The biggest reason was that the channels I followed stopped showing cartoons. For a long time I have been interested in animation, and since anime wasn’t shown outside of the late hours on Adult Swim, I would watch cartoons. Even Cartoon Network switched to showing more live action shows around 2010. Within the past few years channels have aired new animated shows like Steven Universe and Gravity Falls that I’ve been following online instead.

I almost completely missed one of my favorite series, Over the Garden Wall, because it was only aired for one week in November 2014 on Cartoon Network. Luckily I follow the right people on Tumblr, or I would have never known it existed. It’s a great example of original storytelling that doesn’t rely on tropes or stereotypes. What really shocked me was how the female protagonist was portrayed. Despite not being human, she had character, and the other protagonists respected her opinions. Best of all, she isn’t made into a romantic interest! In this show, even the grim characters aren’t always painted as villains, and I can’t help but love a show that can develop interesting characters despite their appearances.

Spoilers ahead!

Vampire Academy: The Movie’s Vain, but the Protagonists Aren’t…

I don’t know about you, but this movie poster is rather off-putting.

Vampire Academy came out in February this year, and even though the film was directed by Mark Waters (who also directed Mean Girls), I hoped the fact that vampires were involved meant that it’d be a little thrilling. After recently watching the film with friends, though, I sadly can’t say that it was scary in the slightest. The moment the opening song started with “Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well…” I knew this wasn’t going to be a horror movie. By the time it ended, I was pleasantly surprised. While the story did follow typical high school problems (with vampires and romance of course), the two main characters were generally treated with respect. These leading ladies could fend for themselves and weren’t afraid to do it. Though the story wasn’t my cup of tea, I can appreciate what the movie did right: how they handled having two female protagonists.

Spoilers, and a trigger warning for animal cruelty after the jump!

Sexualized Saturdays: Who Will Watch the Watchmen? or The Unfortunate Case of Ubiquitous Male Oversight

I was planning to write about how skeevy it is that literally all the clones on Orphan Black are/were in relationships with their monitors (don’t worry, I’ll get to that in a sec), but thinking about this brought me to an unpleasant realization: just how common it is for shows with main female protagonists to have a system of male oversight/regulation above them. If that wasn’t bad enough, we never see an inverse parallel where women oversee/regulate men, nor even situations of matriarchal oversight for female characters. Spoiler alert for Orphan Black and Buffy the Vampire Slayer after the jump.

I’m not a bad guy, I just want to control women’s bodies!

A Little Movie Magic

The day before yesterday, I made loud yelling noises at my computer screen because a thing happened. A particular thing. This thing: it turns out that Fox has tapped (pun intended) writer Simon Kinberg to produce a series of films based on the Magic: the Gathering trading card game. Now, if you don’t know Simon Kinberg, you should; he’s written or produced for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and other such films. Returning to loud yelling noises, Fox wants to make a “series of films,” creating a Magic: The Gathering cinematic universe.

Simon Kinberg

Kinberg will be working closely with executives at Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro as he begins development. Execs are reportedly looking to “launch a massive franchise on the scale of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.” Those are pretty big shoes to fill, especially considering the performance of previous WOTC ventures. Dungeons & Dragons was a singular kind of awful, from the acting, to the special effects, to the plot. So let’s hope that the MTG film can improve significantly upon that.

Now, the film could be a disaster. But I’m much more interested in the film’s potential to be spectacular, or at least meaningful. CGI and make-up technology has come a long way since Dungeons & Dragons, but The Last Airbender is an object lesson in how that does not a great film make. Magic: The Gathering is set in a world (many worlds, really) of swords and sorcery, with elves, dragons, angels, zombies, enchanted automatons and other mystical entities. Certainly, they will need effects technology to bring these creatures and their powers to the screen in convincing ways (if it’s not animated), but the true potential of an MTG cinematic universe is in the diversity of stories that can be told.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones Movie

Sadly—or thankfully, depending on whichever you prefer—this book-to-movie adaptation hasn’t been doing very well. And unfortunately its author, Cassandra Clare, has been at the center of some controversy, most notably accusations of plagiarism. City of Bones follows the fifteen-year-old Clary—played here by twenty-four-year-old Lily Collins, because how big is a nine-year gap, really?—who, after witnessing a murder, is drawn into a world of magic and demons.

It turns out that the murder victim was a demon, and his killer, Jace, is a Shadowhunter, a person who fights demons using magical runes and awesome swords, because swords look cool. When Clary’s mother goes missing and Clary finds herself about to be killed by one of the demons who took her, Jace comes to her rescue. Clary discovers that her mother used to be a Shadowhunter as well, and that her mother had stolen and hid a very powerful relic called the Mortal Cup, capable of turning normal people into the half-angel, half-human Shadowhunters. Thus starts our plot to find Clary’s mother and the Mortal Cup, and this also marks the beginnings of an epic romance between Jace and Clary.

All in all, it doesn’t surprise me that this movie seems to have bombed, however disappointed I am that that’s the case. I’d say that this movie is a fairly decent adaptation of the first book in The Mortal Instruments series. The problem here is that the books are terrible, and they made a really terrible movie. So why am I sad that it’s not doing well?

Well, there are a number of reasons. For starters, it features a female protagonist, and we don’t get a lot of those. It has queer characters, who I thought were some of the most well written characters in the books. And it has a twist in the romance that I thought could have been very well done and unique.

Spoilers for The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones after the jump.

Big Damn Heroines

So The Last of Us. Again. If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s a survival horror based on the concept of a human-infecting cordyceps fungus. It follows a jaded, aging smuggler (Joel) who lost his daughter in the early stages of the apocalypse, as well as a spunky, foul-mouthed teenage girl (Ellie), who is somehow immune to the infection. They fight their way through the ruins of the United States, killing fungus-infected zombies and bandits as they go. The game has incredible character development, revealing both the characters’ backstories and advancing their relationship together, while simultaneously engaging the player in an immersive and occasionally terrifying gaming experience.