Amphibia Review: Hop Luck / Stakeout

"SON OF A SLUG!"

There's a formula key to what feels like every other Amphibia episode so far: something that once seemed insignificant at the start proves to be crucial to the resolution of each narrative. In "Cane Crazy," Anne's hypnotic pen becomes a commodity to pay for reparations to Loggle's damaged shop; in "Flood, Sweat, and Tears," Anne and Sprig's pillow-fighting becomes an invaluable asset in the climactic fight sequence; and now, with "Hop Luck," Hop Pop's old-fashioned book of advice goes from a relic of the past to a vital source of life-saving advice.

Some adherence to that formula is expected, and I know why the writers are using it for now: it works. It's pacing by-the-books, ensuring that episodes make sense and have a satisfying conclusion. The issue is just that, as someone who gets really into the mechanics of plot devices and how narratives get assembled (I'm a massive writing nerd and I apologize profusely), that means that episodes like "Hop Luck" feel transparent in their lack of adventurousness. Luckily, Amphibia is such a charming and charismatic show that it never impedes on the show's ability to be fun, and Anne and the Plantars' quest to gather pizza ingredients in hopes of winning the town's annual cook-off for the first time is an enjoyable enough ride.

Amphibia Review: Cane Crazy / Flood, Sweat, and Tears

"Oh. Oh, I like this."

While the first episodes of Amphibia more firmly established the show's overarching narrative, "Cane Crazy" and "Flood, Sweat, and Tears" reel it back a little. Anne's got two months before she can embark on her journey to the mountainous edges of Amphibia, so the pair making up today's batch is more of a look into what we'll be getting in the meantime, turning out two serviceable episodes more focused on lighthearted adventures with faint beats of character development along the way. They don't aim high, but they make for satisfying entries more focused on getting us comfortable with the characters and their dynamics than adding anything more pressing into the formula, and that's alright with me.

The first of the two, "Cane Crazy," is by far the least eventful, though that's not an inherently bad thing. Both episodes suggest that Amphibia is subscribing to the "monster of the week" episode formula, but it manages to do so in a fun enough way with plenty of creativity, with Anne accidentally breaking Hop Pop's prized, family heirloom cane. Obviously, Hop Pop would be mad at discovering what she did, and she fears that he'll live up to his threats of kicking her out of his house for misbehaving, so Anne, Sprig, and Polly meet up with the local wood expert, Leopold Loggle, a fun character with some fun eccentricities in his devotion to woodworking and unfortunate speech patterns. He ends up pointing them in the direction of the Doom Tree (which turns out to be a strange tree-insect beast) where the original cane's wood comes from, and they set out to fetch a new branch to replace it.

Amphibia Review: Anne or Beast? / Best Fronds

"Guys! I just had the craziest dream where I was trapped in a world of frog pe— Oh. Right."

Amphibia is a show that I've been patiently awaiting for the past year, which is something of a rarity for me. Although I'm someone who generally likes to think that he keeps his tabs on animation, there's not a lot of projects that have filled me with as much excitement as this one.

We're in what I feel like is a very transitional era in cartoons. This is a point where it's becoming clear which shows in the past few years were the true trend-setters, and a point where animation is becoming increasingly serialized, more intent on telling a longer narrative with dramatic twists and turns that allows for deeper character investment as opposed to the zanier, episodic antics of cartoon's past. There's also been more pushes for diversity in the voices of those creating animated programming, and Amphibia is no exception. It's culled from the mind of Matt Braly, a half-Thai former storyboard artist for Gravity Falls and Steven Universe, basing the show off of his childhood experiences of visiting Bangkok.

Although the influence of the show off of his childhood is currently more subdued (it'll play more of a hand in the show as the season progresses), that sense of being a fish out of a water in a strange world is retained, and the creation of animation's first Thai-American protagonist, Anne Boonchuy (voiced by Brenda Song), is an exciting development: as a person of half-Asian descent myself, let alone also being named Matt, Amphibia had me sold from the start. It helps, too, that if the first two episodes are any indication, we're in for the start of a wonderful new show.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Decisions

"There! I made a decision to do... exactly what that guy told me... ugh."

Self-awareness in late seasons of a TV show is something of a double-edged sword. In some cases, it comes across as smarmy, making fun of your show's own failings without making any proper amendments to fix them, but in other cases, it's a step towards fixing some deeper-set issues. Whether or not "The Decisions" was able to symbolically fix up Darwin's spotty history as a character over the past few seasons of sidelining, it's far more in the latter lane than the former.

Darwin's always been something of a difficult character for the show to grapple with. While there are some pretty solid spotlights here and there, most recently with "The Sucker," he's relegated to a supporting role without even the faintest bit of influence over what's going on too many times to count, and while he once had a fun level of tact in that role (like in "The Hug," by calling out Gumball's idiocy), the past two seasons have eroded most of that away, making him a pleasant but biteless partner-in-crime. That's what makes "The Decisions" so exciting in its self-awareness: Darwin finally realizes that all he does is whatever Gumball tells him, and he needs to learn how to forge his own path in life.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Revolt

"STOP OBJECTIFYING OBJECTS!"

Remember how, in my last review, I said that when all is right, Gumball's writers sure know how to make an episode fly? Yeah... this is what happens when that fails.

Gumball is, indisputably, a show that puts comedy first, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Whereas cartoons are generally headed in a more serious, narratively-driven direction, Gumball is one of the last strong shows working episodically with the central focus of being fun, and that prevents it from being as weighed down as its contemporaries in the sense that anything can happen. While that usually plays out to the show's benefit, though, there's a lot of ways it can go wrong, with writers instead using the opportunity to go sloppily apeshit in pursuit of some self-destructive idea that works against the show, because as I said, anything can happen, right?

"The Revolt" isn't just one of those episodes: it's the epitome of everything going as roughly as you could imagine. It suffers every single issue that a Gumball episode possibly could, and whereas there's quite a few episodes that unfortunately fall victim to a few issues, "The Revolt's" licked a few too many doorknobs, and it's just sweltering with grotesque infection.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Heart

"What seemed sweet has turned out to be lethally toxic, like feeding a chocolate cake to a puppy, next to the tailpipe of a 4x4, in the middle of an oil spill, while reading it Elmore Stream comments."

It's surprising how many recent episodes have made efforts to be legitimately sweet or optimistic in one way or another. "The Heart" is the latest installment to take that direction, serving to bury the hatchet between Mr. Robinson and his toxic relationship with Gumball and Darwin by reaching into the emotional core, or rather the lack thereof, of his character.

It's an exciting development considering how repetitive and nonsensical the Watterson brothers' infatuation with him is. It feels like one of the few major elements from the show's first season that's really survived this far into the program, with episodes centered around him often going in the same direction: Gumball and Darwin give him nothing but love, but he isn't having any of it. "The Heart" reaches an interesting fork in the road, though, by forcing them to realize that Mr. Robinson has never loved them, and it crushes their souls. Not only does that freeze up the normal route these sorts of episodes like to take, but it pushes Mr. Robinson into the spotlight as an unlikely protagonist, and the new angle does wonders.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Mess

"Ask me for anything you like and I'll buy it for you!" "I would like the golden twinkle in an old man's eye as he holds his infant granddaughter." "What?" 

For whatever reason, Gumball's writers really like making Gumball sleep-deprived for quick jokes. The good news, though, is that they do it incredibly well, and evolving his sleep-deprivation into a full-fledged, conceptual episode alongside Darwin was a smart way to elevate the gag with some new wrinkles added to the formula. Fueled—or, I guess, the opposite of that, really—by a night of video-watching, Gumball and Darwin are tasked with watching Penny's sister, Polly (making her first major appearance in an episode) though they fade in and out of consciousness repeatedly, losing Polly along the way and awakening every minute somewhere else, in the middle of a new scenario with an inexplicable lack of context.

That's the game of "The Mess," and it's a ton of stupid fun. Watching Gumball and Darwin run around at only half of their mental power is already fun enough, allowing for more interesting dialogue and an all-around weirder narrative, but centering it around them attempting (and failing) to babysit Polly adds a nice sense of urgency to everything. It's just a terrible day, but amplified up a thousand times, and that kind of idea is right up the show's alley.