McHale and Krentz’s ten-part fairy tale about two brothers lost in an autumn wood is a children’s cartoon that will frighten you and make you laugh in the same minute. The songs are uneven and one episode idles, but it is over in two hours.
Patrick McHale and Katie Krentz’s miniseries runs to ten episodes of about twelve minutes, so the whole story is told in less time than most animated features. Two brothers are lost in a wood called The Unknown. Wirt (Elijah Wood) is a teenager who worries; Gregory (Collin Dean) is small, cheerful and carries a frog he keeps renaming. A Woodsman (Christopher Lloyd) with a lantern warns them of a Beast in the trees, and a bluebird called Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey) offers to lead them to somebody who can send them home. It is a fairy tale in the old sense, where everyone you meet is polite and some of them may want to eat you, and it is as good a children’s programme as we have seen in some years.
The Unknown is drawn to look like a nineteenth-century American picture book. There are harvest fields and pumpkin patches, a tavern lit by candles, a schoolhouse of animals in pinafores and sailor collars, a riverboat crewed by frogs in evening dress. The backgrounds are painted in browns and rusts and a grey-blue for dusk, and nearly every episode is set in the last hour of daylight. Nate Cash directs the run and keeps the frames wide and the camera still, so the boys are small shapes at the bottom of a great deal of landscape. Nothing is over-lit. When light does arrive it is usually the Woodsman’s lantern, and it arrives with him.
We were more frightened than we expected to be by a PG cartoon. The Beast, when he shows himself, is a black shape with antlers and two pale eyes, and he is sung rather than spoken by Samuel Ramey, an opera bass, whose voice comes up through the mix as if from under the floor. The first time he sang across a dark clearing we sat forward on the sofa and then, a little embarrassed, checked the certificate. McHale holds the moment without a joke to let the air out, which is not how children’s television usually behaves.
Then it turns and makes you laugh. In an episode at a school for animals run by Miss Langtree (Janet Klein), Greg sings a song about potatoes and molasses with such flat conviction that we laughed out loud, and Wood plays Wirt’s embarrassment at his brother with the exact pitch of an older sibling who is fourteen and knows everything. Lynskey’s Beatrice is the best voice work in it: quick, rude, and unhappier than a bluebird has any business being. Lloyd, as the Woodsman, keeps his voice down, which we do not often hear from him. The songs and score are by Justin Rubenstein and Josh Kaufman, and they move between parlour ballad, ragtime and hymn as each town requires. Deborah Voigt turns up late as a Queen of the Clouds, and Chris Isaak as Enoch, the soft-spoken head of Pottsfield.
Not all of it lands. The songs are the point of some episodes and the padding of others, and an episode set in a mansion, with a tea merchant who thinks his house is haunted, stops the journey for twelve minutes and gives little back. Wirt’s whining is accurate and, by the middle stretch, wearing. And the short form means some of the best places, Pottsfield above all, with its citizens in pumpkin heads and its harvest dance, are left almost as soon as they are drawn. We would have stayed an hour there.
Pendleton Ward, who created Adventure Time, is among the writers, and the kinship shows: both programmes will put a joke next to something sad and leave it there. But this is smaller, quieter and finished, which Adventure Time took years to be. Set against fairy-tale cartoons in general it stands well. The danger is never taken back by a cutaway, and nobody learns a lesson out loud.
Watch it in one sitting, in the dark, in the last week of October if you can bear to wait. It is a PG, and rightly: a child of seven will want a lap for the Beast, and an adult will want a blanket. The final two episodes take a turn we will not describe, except to say that it explains the hats.
