At the end of last year one of the best animated series to ever grace the television screen came to an end. I am writing, of course, of the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time. This animated series created by Pendleton Ward tells the adventures of two brothers, Jake the shape-shifting dog and Finn the human in the magical land of Ooo.
Ooo is an eclectic collection of environments from the minds of its designers. The opening sequence gives us a glimpse of a few of these. It consists of a kingdom of beings made entirely out of candy, a kingdom made of ice, a fiery kingdom run by demons, a cosmic realm that is home to the world’s strange gods including Party God (a dog head with a backwards baseball cap) and the cosmic owl (who invades the characters’ dreams from time to time) and many others (the strangest of which may be the kingdom occupied entirely by cats in boxes).
The world design alone tells a story around the main plot lines. The world has a dark side to which the viewer is gradually exposed in little snippets throughout the series.
What we aren’t told at the beginning is that Ooo is, in fact, a version of our world way in the future. We are given a glimpse of our planet, viewed from outer space, with a whole chunk blown out of it. Backgrounds are littered with debris from our present. Is the strange, fantastical landscape of Ooo the result of some kind of nuclear disaster? Is it the figment of the imagination of someone from a post apocalyptic world with elements of a devastated landscape inching into the fairytale?
What made the series so good for both kids and adults was its incredible world building. The landscape manages to be both whimsical and devastated, post apocalyptic as well as fairytale. The landscape itself embodies a sort of nostalgia as we see elements of our present embedded into the landscape of our childhood imaginations.
