By pairing musical sequences with short, episodic stories that complexly reflect on notions of temporality, Adventure Time makes its own argument that animated fantasy can function as the perfect vehicle for encouraging active, fantastic, and imaginative viewer engagement with their world.ĭespite most episodes spanning only eleven minutes, Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time has an ability to ‘interplay between the demands of episodic and serial storytelling’, which manages to create ‘narratively complex television’ (Mittell 2006: 33, 38). With special attention to Adventure Time’s use of music and fascination with time, the series finale, ‘Come Along with Me,’ acts as a concluding argument to a 283-episode long thesis. Using Jason Mittell’s notion of narrative complexity as a lens, this post will identify how a seemingly unobtrusive children’s cartoon managed to maximise the use of its narrative tools and its exemption from the logic of reality to create a story that transcends all categorisation. Adventure Time takes advantage of the very non-reality of its animated form by incorporating fantastical and musical sequences, elements that might stand out from a live-action show that, by nature of its physicality in the real world, cannot as easily convince viewers to suspend all notions of rationality. With themes of temporality, cyclicality, the apocalypse, and growing up, the narrative of Adventure Time seems to be in direct conversation with its time-constricted episodic television format, as well as the time-and-physics-bending medium of animation. In September 2018, after ten seasons following a human boy named Finn, his adoptive brother, a shape-shifting, talking dog named Jake (Fig.1), and their zany hijinks, quests, and adventures in the post-nuclear apocalyptic land of Ooo, cult-pop cartoon series Adventure Time (Pendleton Ward, 2010-2018) finally drew to a close.
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