Over the Garden Wall

My accelerated running goals have coincided with my latest addiction to the Cartoon Network miniseries, Over the Garden Wall. I managed both to go running and to finish watching the series today, but it took every ounce of will power to pry myself from the couch. I set a very ambitious goal the other day, a goal which does not complement my personality of cartoon-watching, köfte-eating couch potato. My goal is to run the Alexander the Great Marathon in April. The race is in Thessaloniki, the birthplace of both Ataturk and Alexander the Great. While trying to motivate myself to be athletic by imagining myself in the sandals of Alexander the Great, all I could think about was how sad it was that Alexander the Great lived in a time before cartoons.

Everything about Over the Garden Wall is old-fashioned, the 1930's style of the drawings, the Americana music, even the morals and deeper meanings, which seemed to carry a religious tone. Gregory, a sweet innocent boy, is a foil to his adolescent brother, Wirt. They are lost in a purgatory-type landscape known as The Unknown and they must find their way back home with plenty of hard-learned lessons along the way. Gregory seems to have Jesus's saying down pat that "Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

Everything, of course, is up to interpretation, and another viewer might take away something completely different. Whatever message you take away, it's still a masterpiece of animation. Now that I've finished all ten episodes, I can take my running a bit more seriously.

Thessaloniki, here I come!