If you were late with your previous entries, exceptionally quiet in class or feel you need extra credit for whatever reason, comment on either or both of the Extra Credit entries (Hayao Miyazaki, Adventure Time.) The more you do, the more extra credit you accrue.
Post ONE reaction ( minimum 250 words) to the combined reading (and listening) linked. Students are encouraged (but not required) to additionally respond to other student reactions.
"Castles in the Air: The gorgeous existential funk of Adventure Time." By Emily Nussbaum
"An 'Adventure' For Kids And Maybe For Their Parents, Too: An NPR Interview w. Lev Grossman"
"An ode to Adventure Time, one of TV’s most ambitious — and, yes, most adventurous — shows." By Dan Schindel
6 comments:
AAAAAAAAA / Daniel:
Though I did watch TV as a kid, I never really got into Adventure Time. Sure, I’d seen a few episodes at a friends’ or family member’s house, but I never went out of my way to catch episodes as they aired. But from the opinions of the many friends I’ve met who love the show to bits, Adventure Time does have my respect. There’s a lot of cartoons and “kids’ shows” that, from the perspective of an older self, come off as immature or basic — even from my limited exposure, I know Adventure Time is not one of them.
The Ulaby and Schindel articles both point out the timelessness of the show, how it appeals to both kids, teens, and adults alike. While retaining the crazy, hyperactive, imaginative aesthetic of a typical cartoon, the moments or arcs of “gravitas and emotion” (Schindel) help distinguish it. I watched the scene provided, “Everything Stays,” and I was, for lack of better description, floored. It’s like one of the rules of writing we learned, focusing on the “superfluous gestures, brief pauses” (Schindel) and smaller details present in a reaction, an environment, that stick more strongly in the mind. Even though I have no clue about Adventure Time lore, I feel like I understand a decent part of Marceline’s character, and the creators’ ability to compact so much depth in a 1-2 minute snippet is insane to me.
I never expected a person “watching his own death” (Ulaby) and allusions to “having Alzhiemer’s” (Ulaby) to come from a kids’ show, but I guess Adventure Time is built different. But the fact that such tough topics are not being shunned, but embraced, lines up well with the general ethos around middle grade and young adult — not treating the reader like a child, not writing to teach a moral, but simply allowing a means of exploring an emotion through a funny pastel world and its characters. It reminds me a lot of The Little Prince: when I read it as a child, I got caught up in the wonder of space and the ridiculousness of adults. Each time I reread, as a teen and more recently as an adult, I find crazy amounts of depth that hit so much harder now.
Yuri / Lei:
As someone with a younger sister and a father who is obsessed with Anime, I always seemed to have some kind of animation playing around me. I grew up watching anime that I was way too young to be seeing, and as I grew older and thought myself too mature to watch cartoons, I still found myself drawn to them. Although I didn’t necessarily watch Adventure Time in my youth, I was a big fan of other, much more silly cartoons, such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Fanboy and ChumChum. However, that isn’t to say I wasn’t familiar with Adventure Time. I had seen a couple of episodes here and there, but I had never really sat down and watched it intentionally. This also goes for a couple of other shows, like Steven Universe and Gravity Falls. I bring these other shows up because I was particularly struck by Grossman’s conversation about how well Adventure Time works as a bridge between him and his eight-year-old daughter, Lily. Before quarantine, my younger sister and I had never really been close, and our age gap didn’t help us find many common interests. I always hated that we lived in the same house but were more akin to strangers than sisters. However, quarantine provided me with a lot of free time to get to know her a little better, and most of that time was spent going back and watching these cartoons. We were in awe at how appealing these stories were to two different age groups (I had just started high school, while she was starting fifth grade), and that gave us the opportunity to discuss different scenes and topics and how they impacted us. To this day, my sister and I love to watch things together, and we share more common interests than ever before.
As someone who grew up watching Adventure Time and Cartoon Network as a whole, I was always a fan of the direction it would go in. I have fond memories of watching the characters develop and as I got older, I really came to appreciate Adventure Time’s boldness. At first, the episodes would usually have this very Mario or Zelda esque feel of saving the princess and defeating her captor but as the show progressed I was exposed to a lot of nuance to how the characters work, paralleling the real-world nuance of people. I also saw the show tackle so many different questions that no other show really wanted to tackle, so I thank Adventure Time for expanding how I would want to go about writing and building characters in my own works. I think a really strong point of this is when Grossman talks about Lemongrab, a character I also didn’t like and still don’t, but the questions that character raised can’t be ignored. I think that is what makes Adventure Time so compelling to any audience, it doesn’t show its hand all the time, but there’s this sense of cohesion, of planning that goes into it. The show does so much to not be limited by the restrictions of being a “children’s show” and that is something it excels at, it doesn’t shy away from the eerie backstories or the defeat and despair that exist. Another point is Ice King’s character, which by the end has almost done a 180, from this weird perverted old king who kidnaps princesses to marry to seeing who he was before the crown corrupted his mind, what led him to use the crown, and who he became after he remembered. And the best part is that rewatching the series makes you realize how the pieces were there from the beginning.
Natalie (aka Miles)
The articles below evaluate the nuances of the animated series, "Adventure Times". In the combined reading, the authors evaluate the genre distinction of whether or not the show belongs to a younger demographic or the large adult audience it maintains. While I have never seen the series, I am familiar with it. I believe that the media is worthwhile for anyone who wishes to enjoy it but as denoted specifically in the article, "An 'Adventure' For Kids And Maybe For Their Parents, Too" by Neda Ulaby, the three-time Emmy winning show may possess some intellectual merit. I truly believe that this is often the case with animated series. Many people discount it as mindless entertainment or something specifically geared towards children but I have often maintained that media can be worthwhile to anyone of any age and does not necessarily need to meet a certain rubric in order to be beneficial. It can simply be enjoyable. However, what makes this argumentative line of thinking even better is that there are often layers embedded within animated series. There are sometimes entire plot lines or underlying themes geared directly towards adult audience members (and for good reason as that is a vast majority of its viewership). While books and media are designated into specific genre demographics such as young adult and middle grade, that does not necessarily mean that viewers from other age groups can not or would not enjoy them. Many discount the show "Adventure Times" as they cannot see past its surface-level humor and abstract, exceedingly colorful, post-apocalyptic world. Many never even give the show the chance to reveal what these writers are raving about; the show's ability to teach through example without isolating or condemning an audience.
Growing up I watched Adventure Time but I never realized it's effect on me until I was around Finn's age. Like the adults in the article that assumed it was just a dumb cartoon for kids, when I was younger I felt the opposite. My older brother always watched it so I assumed it was a "boy" thing. Though I liked the show I gladly switched it to something easier to digest like disney channel or nickelodeon. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I was able to understand the nuances within Adventure Time. It's takes on death, friendships, relationships, and trust.
Adventure Time handles dark topics carefully with light humor and that made it comforting to watch. It feels almost similar to PBS Kids where they intersect education with entertainment. As mentioned in New Yorker article, there are so many characters within the Adventure Time universe which makes it easy to connect to them. This and their plot points. Marceline's anger at her dad, her cynical view on the world, Finn's naivety in a post war world, his desire to always help. These are characteristics that you can find within yourself or someone you know. One of the plot points that's always stuck with me in the Ice King's story. I'd never known anything like it. One of my biggest fears is losing my memory and Ice King's backstory makes it so much sadder knowing he can never get his old self back. The best part of Adventure Time is it's arguable the character growth. Character's don't stay stagnant as seen in so many children's cartoons. As you grow up, they grow up along side you like family.
I was extremely excited to see these readings posted since Adventure Time is actually my favorite cartoon (and I'm even persuaded to say show) of all time for a lot of the reasons, but mainly how the show is able to be fun and hilariously random, but, like the first article says, you start to realize as the series progresses that the world has an eerie backstory, and many of the characters have dark and tragic origins as well, something unexpected from the zany episodic show that it appears to be at first. These storylines also unfold as the series air, and ideally as the watcher grows up with finn, and goes through some of the things (though obviously less fantastical) that he encounters throughout the story, allowing the show to grow up and the characters to develop and mature with the watcher. Adventure time is one of the only shows that I've seen able to effectively do this-- even binge-watching the show now you truly feel like the world grows and changes and matures as the show runs through, as do the characters, which is a large aspect as to why the show is so easy to get attached to.
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