Abstract
Pointedly nostalgic in both its source material and storytelling approach, Over the Garden Wall’s vintage aesthetic is not merely decorative, but ideological. The miniseries responds to recent postmodern fairy tale adaptations by stripping away a century of popular culture references and using motifs, not to invoke and upset increasingly familiar fairy tales, but as an artist’s palette of evocative, available images. In privileging imagery and mood over lessons, Over the Garden Wall captures something that has become vanishingly rare in children’s media: the moral ambiguity of fairy tale worlds.1
Highlights
Wall’s vintage aesthetic is not merely decorative, but ideological
Rough hemp necklaces, swapped in the night for the gold chains of the giant’s children. These familiar motifs leap to mind, not just because we know them from various versions of Snow White (ATU 709), Donkeyskin (ATU 510B), and Mollie Whuppie (ATU 327B), and because they are rich in sensory detail, marked by vivid colors and textures
Over the Garden Wall is rich in familiar fairy tale motifs used in unfamiliar ways: in the opening sequence, Greg leaves a trail of candy to mark their path, like the trail of breadcrumbs (R135.1) in Hansel and Gretel (ATU 327, 431)
Summary
The miniseries opens in medias res, as brothers Wirt (Elijah Wood) and Greg (Collin Dean) find themselves in a dark wood where the straight way is lost. Wirt and Greg encounter a colorful cast of characters, and in each of the ten 11-minute, self-contained episodes, learn about themselves and this strange world. The title “Babes in the Wood” itself is a reference to the traditional broadside ballad, and foreshadows the episode’s plot: discouraged from their fruitless search for the way home, Wirt and Greg lie down in the snow, cover themselves with leaves, and nearly freeze to death. As Salon television critic Sonia Saraiya notes, “You don’t need to know the referents in ‘Over the Garden Wall’ to understand the story; it draws on such deeply rooted archetypes that it feels like a lost tale produced from the depths of childhood” [3]. In the same way that “Herder, the Grimms, Schoolcraft, and Boas [ . . . ] pioneered techniques of textual hybridization in which written texts came to mirror as transparently and authentically as possible a set of primordial oral, traditional texts that they purported to recontextualize,” ([2], p. 312) Over the Garden Wall paradoxically produces a sense of originality and authenticity by the depth and variety of its literary and artistic intertexts
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