McHale has made one thing his own, Over the Garden Wall (2014), and it is a proper fairy tale: polite, autumnal, and willing to frighten children without a joke to soften it. The rest of his career has been in service of other people's stories.
Fi1m perspective
At some point in Over the Garden Wall a black shape with antlers and two pale eyes stands across a dark clearing and sings. He is voiced by Samuel Ramey, an opera bass, and the voice comes up through the mix as if from under the floor. McHale does nothing to help you. There is no cut to a frightened face, no gag from the small brother, no music cue to say it will be all right. We sat forward on the sofa the first time the Beast sang, and then, a little embarrassed, checked the certificate, which says PG. That is McHale's habit in one scene: set a mood, hold it, and trust the audience, including the small ones, to sit in it.
He came up through Cartoon Network. He wrote and storyboarded on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (2008), then joined Pendleton Ward on Adventure Time (2010) as creative director for its first two seasons and kept writing for it into the fifth. A short, Tome of the Unknown (2013), grew into the ten-episode Over the Garden Wall, made with Katie Krentz, and that is where the career sits, because he has not created another series since. Afterwards he co-wrote the screenplay and lyrics for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022), and in 2024 he went back to the wood for a stop-motion short with Aardman.
What he does well is the contained thing. Ten episodes of about twelve minutes, so the whole story takes less time than most animated features, and every stopping place in The Unknown is its own small tale, with its own manners and its own chance that somebody at the table wants to eat you. Wirt (Elijah Wood) worries, Gregory (Collin Dean) renames his frog, and the wood around them is drawn from Gustave Doré engravings and the early Disney shorts, with songs by The Blasting Company pitched to match. McHale has said that "a lot of decisions were based on the mood that we were trying to evoke rather than story," and you can tell. It is why the thing holds up ten years on, and also why the songs are uneven and one episode idles, which we said at the time. A mood does not always know when to move on.
The reservation is about quantity, not quality. One miniseries, a short and a shared screenplay is a thin shelf for a man whose one thing of his own is this good. His credits on Adventure Time and Pinocchio tell us he can serve another person's world; they do not tell us what he would do with a long run of his own, and whether the fog he likes would hold across twenty hours rather than two is an open question he seems in no hurry to answer. Start with Over the Garden Wall, in autumn, with the lights low. It is over in an evening, which is rather the point.
Biography
Patrick McHale is an American animator, storyboard artist, screenwriter, director and musician. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006 with a BFA in character animation. He began his career at Cartoon Network Studios as a writer and storyboard artist on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (2007–2008).
McHale served as creative director, writer and storyboard artist on Adventure Time (2010–2017). He created the animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall (2014), on which he also worked as writer, executive producer, storyboard artist and songwriter.
McHale co-wrote the screenplay and contributed lyrics to Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022). The series Over the Garden Wall won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program. He received a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society and an Eisner Award for the related comic book series.
