"If you're not back in two minutes, we'll move your desk to a bathroom stall." "I know you mean that as a threat, but as we're not allowed to take bathroom breaks, it would technically be an improvement."An episode centered around the Rainbow Factory has been teased for quite a while, so expectations of "The Factory" were fairly high. This was our chance to find out about one of Elmore's few locations that has never been properly explored, after all, and it's a factory that makes rainbows! Obviously, knowing Gumball, there's something a lot more shady afoot, but it was all a matter of trying to figure out what. The answer: it's pretty much like anywhere else, if not painfully sugar-coated.
Thankfully, though, "The Factory," even if a fairly traditional episode, was able to key into the funner aspects of a change in location. Everything, plot-wise, is fairly straightforward: Nicole has to negotiate with the CEOs of the Rainbow Factory to make sure it doesn't get shut down, and Gumball and Darwin do their silly little Gumball and Darwin thing of tagging along without being asked. They're definitely made more naive here than usual, acting more like kids without the faintest bit of cynicism, but focusing on the more juvenile aspects of their personality works well enough here, especially in the episode's musical number.
If there's anything that the episode really has going for it, it's the song-and-dance number Gumball and Darwin have as they waltz cheerfully (well, increasingly less so) through the factory and discover the darker underbelly of what a job at the Rainbow Factory actually entails. It's just classic Gumball fare: well-written, playfully subversive, and incredibly dark, all set to a particularly jaunty little tune. The crushingly specific details of the song kill—the rainbows, for instance, are made of gasoline, arsenic, latex, lead, and rust, and the factory is overrun by toxic gases—and there's a fun ebb and flow of having Gumball and Darwin increasingly come to terms with the reality of the job: it blows.Elsewhere, Gumball sticks to its guns, procuring fine but expected comedic flourishes. For the most part, Nicole's meetings with the company's two CEOs (both talking piggy banks, rather fittingly) do as you'd assume they would, with her struggling to dissuade them from shutting down the Rainbow Factory while delivering heartless factoids about their lives. It's not unfocused, but it just sort of exists passively to set the tracks for "The Factory's" grand finish, a hallucinatory, gas-fueled trip after Gumball and Darwin unwisely press a random button that envelops the Rainbow Factory in knockout fumes.
Gumball, as a series, loves to play with trippy sequences to showcase weirder animation and distorted visuals, and "The Factory" has its fun, turning the third act into a drugged-out, incredibly slow action sequence with frequent blurs between the real world and the Wattersons' imaginations. It's just a fun time for everyone involved: the writers get to fiddle around with the main cast being drugged out, the actors get to pretend that they're drugged out, and the animators/artists get to be drugged out. (That last part was an obvious joke.)At the end of the day, Gumball and Darwin get to save the factory, all while ensuring longer vacation days and pay raises for its employees (the fall-out of a CEO saying some regrettable stuff). Everyone's happy, giving a surprisingly cheerful ending to a fun little crowdpleaser of an episode if nothing else.
Notes and Quotes:
-"Please take us!" "No!" "We'll pay you ten dollars!" (passes bribe) "'Can we have ten dollars?'"
-"Hanging out with dad on his workday is like watching a ripe avocado turn into guacamole with just the force of gravity."
-"Darwin, all it takes for bad things to happen is for good people to do nothing." "I don't think we count as good people."
-"Children in the workplace?! What is this, every other factory I own?"
-"I'm a wealthy man! This isn't how it's supposed to end! I'm supposed to croak alone in my mansion surrounded by all the expensive things I wasted my life buying while my children fight over their inheritance!"
FINAL GRADE: B. There's a lot to appreciate about "The Factory," with a fantastic musical number and fun climax, and while those two parts of it carry the episode a long way, as a whole, everything about it feels fairly conventional. There's not a problem with that, but there's nothing too new here, and "The Factory" ends up going pleasantly through one ear and out the other, accomplishing precisely what it wanted to and nothing more. My opinion of it might change with time, but as of right now, for me, it's in the upper echelon of the middle of the road, something that'll quench your thirst but without anything to spare.For the last Gumball review of "The Wish," CLICK HERE.
For updates every time I post a new review, follow me on Twitter @Matt_a_la_mode.
Well, it is a literal rainbow factory. I can't exactly blame Gumball and Darwin for expecting something magical.
ReplyDeleteY'know, Alli, you're on to something there.
DeleteIt's great that even this late into its run that the show can still bring about some bold visuals that really utilize the multimedia animation. The way realistic background warped when the cast was attempting to escape was truly something amazing and unlike anything we have really seen from the show. The bizarre and trippy designs that came with the hallucinations, while not groundbreaking, were still eyecandy. And of course, the fluidity to Darwin's dream was quite enthralling.
ReplyDeleteOutside of the climax, however, the episode is pretty standard fare. It's a perfectly good episode, but it's not winning awards. With that said, I liked it well enough and certainly wouldn't mind rewatching it in the future (especially with the climax). Who knows? Perhaps it will grow on me in the future.
Also, the lack of Mr. Yoshida in this episode is beyond strange. The owner of the Rainbow Factory is nowhere to be seen at all in the meeting that will determine whether or not his factory will be shut down forever. It seems like such an arbitrary omission. Alas, the episode goes on without him.
I honestly don't know how much my opinion of "The Factory" is going to change because I feel like it could either go slightly up or slightly down; this is just the sort of episode that lacks a certain level of elaboration, so you have to appreciate it at surface-level for what it's trying to be, which is an incredibly traditional episode with a few surprises. While the climax has some great moments, like each of the characters' imaginations repeatedly intruding upon one another, I feel like it was also fairly straightforward with the exception of a few visually exciting moments (though I much prefer the dream logic of "The Brain," even), so the only part that I legitimately view as stand-out is the musical number and how it loops back around for the ending, which is a solidly happy note.
DeleteBut yeah, Mr. Yoshida should've been here to some capacity. I get the idea that they had to remove him so that Nicole could step up to represent the company, and that there's not a real place for him with how the episode was written here, but his absence is still pretty jarring, especially considering his underrepresentation as it is.