Hello everyone, and welcome to the first post on this Adventure Time blog. This blog is two things – first of all, it's a long-term project for a class I'm taking, and second of all, it's a semi-continuation of a blogging project that I attempted to start three-ish years ago and never got off the ground. My goal for that blog was to write about every Adventure Time episode in order; I got about 12 episodes in and fell off. At the moment, I'm no longer interested in that approach. Instead, I'll be writing blog entries about more general topics – this post, for example, will soon become a post discussing Walter Benjamin's analysis of Mickey Mouse and how that pertains to Adventure Time, and some future topics include questions of auteurship, animation, and the nature of quality television, using Adventure Time as my lens.
And so, without further ado, let's begin discussing Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin was a German theorist who was primarily active in the 1920s and 1930s; he was a Marxist and affiliated with the famous Frankfurt School. He had wide-ranging interests and wrote brief fragments on anything that caught his fancy; his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, was a sprawling analysis of almost every aspect of life in Paris, with chapters on everything from literary history to streetlights. Benjamin, who was Jewish, died in 1940 while trying to flee from the Nazis.
For my purposes here, I'll be looking at a very short fragment Benjamin wrote about Mickey Mouse in 1931. Although it's a short sketch, it's extremely dense and has a lot of very, very interesting ideas. I'll be using it to look at Adventure Time as a whole; closer readings will crop up in future posts.
Let's start with an extremely bold assertion by Benjamin:
"In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization."
What does it mean to make preparations to survive civilization? Presumably, having survived civilization, mankind will make the move into a new phase – something that cannot be called human civilization. Interestingly, this is precisely the premise that Adventure Time is built on, as is evident from the very first frame of the show's opening credits:
Adventure Time is a show that is heavily invested in eschatology, in more ways than one. The primary temporal setting of the show is thousands of years after a massive global calamity that wiped out human civilization; the new form the world takes is profoundly post-human and vastly different than that which came before, despite being palimpsestically built on the ruins of the past. Characters live in abandoned houses; forests have grown over abandoned subway tunnels; sewer systems still snake through the ground with no cities built on top of them. Furthermore, Adventure Time frequently looks forward to this new world's apocalypse as well; the episodes Lemonhope and Graybles 1,000+ both take place long after the land of Ooo has been destroyed and rendered unrecognizable from the standpoint of any of its characters. There is much to be written about Adventure Time as ecotelevision, but that is a point for another piece.
"Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in humankind."
Adventure Time, from the off, is interested in disrupting the idea of humanity as A) the rightful rulers of the earth, and as B) the culmination of evolution. Ooo has not been inherited by humans – the most powerful being in Ooo is Princess Bubblegum, a millennium-old piece of sentient candy. In the far future, the humans are completely gone – even Finn and any descendants he might have had no longer exist as humans. Furthermore, the vast majority of characters in the show (aside from Finn, by far the most significant human character) are profoundly non-human. Jake the Dog, one of the two main characters, is able to completely morph his body to any shape, frequently leading him to contort himself into extremely grotesque shapes – a form of motion completely alien to humanity.
"Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatmospherically."
The mention of fairy tales is interesting here because one of Adventure Time's primary sources that it draws from is the world of fairy tales. Ooo is ruled by princesses; Finn and Jake are a variation of the archetypical boy and his dog; there are antagonistic wizards that exist on the outskirts of society. Furthermore, Adventure Time is a show on Cartoon Network and inherits all the baggage that that entails. Cartoon Network has a standardized 11-minute length for episodes and a long tradition of TV shows that don't have overarching narratives – shows like Ed, Edd, and Eddy or Code Name: Kids Next Door followed the format set by American sitcoms wherein every episode ultimately returned to the status quo. Adventure Time, for its first three seasons, followed roughly this model, and always followed a model wherein each 11-minute episode was a completely contained narrative in itself. As such, Adventure Time demanded extremely efficient and unusual storytelling. In the episode Something Big, which ties up a large number of plot points and features a battle for the future of Ooo, events such as a recurring character's permanent death are dealt with quickly and unatmospherically; the whole plot is wrapped up within 8 minutes, leaving the remaining time to philosophical meanderings.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this first edition of me rambling about Adventure Time and film theory. Come back next week for more.
And so, without further ado, let's begin discussing Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin was a German theorist who was primarily active in the 1920s and 1930s; he was a Marxist and affiliated with the famous Frankfurt School. He had wide-ranging interests and wrote brief fragments on anything that caught his fancy; his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, was a sprawling analysis of almost every aspect of life in Paris, with chapters on everything from literary history to streetlights. Benjamin, who was Jewish, died in 1940 while trying to flee from the Nazis.
For my purposes here, I'll be looking at a very short fragment Benjamin wrote about Mickey Mouse in 1931. Although it's a short sketch, it's extremely dense and has a lot of very, very interesting ideas. I'll be using it to look at Adventure Time as a whole; closer readings will crop up in future posts.
Let's start with an extremely bold assertion by Benjamin:
"In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization."
What does it mean to make preparations to survive civilization? Presumably, having survived civilization, mankind will make the move into a new phase – something that cannot be called human civilization. Interestingly, this is precisely the premise that Adventure Time is built on, as is evident from the very first frame of the show's opening credits:
Adventure Time is a show that is heavily invested in eschatology, in more ways than one. The primary temporal setting of the show is thousands of years after a massive global calamity that wiped out human civilization; the new form the world takes is profoundly post-human and vastly different than that which came before, despite being palimpsestically built on the ruins of the past. Characters live in abandoned houses; forests have grown over abandoned subway tunnels; sewer systems still snake through the ground with no cities built on top of them. Furthermore, Adventure Time frequently looks forward to this new world's apocalypse as well; the episodes Lemonhope and Graybles 1,000+ both take place long after the land of Ooo has been destroyed and rendered unrecognizable from the standpoint of any of its characters. There is much to be written about Adventure Time as ecotelevision, but that is a point for another piece.
Lemonhope wandering through the ruins of a future Candy Kingdom
"Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in humankind."
Adventure Time, from the off, is interested in disrupting the idea of humanity as A) the rightful rulers of the earth, and as B) the culmination of evolution. Ooo has not been inherited by humans – the most powerful being in Ooo is Princess Bubblegum, a millennium-old piece of sentient candy. In the far future, the humans are completely gone – even Finn and any descendants he might have had no longer exist as humans. Furthermore, the vast majority of characters in the show (aside from Finn, by far the most significant human character) are profoundly non-human. Jake the Dog, one of the two main characters, is able to completely morph his body to any shape, frequently leading him to contort himself into extremely grotesque shapes – a form of motion completely alien to humanity.
Jake pursuing Finn in a wormlike form, from Who Would Win
The mention of fairy tales is interesting here because one of Adventure Time's primary sources that it draws from is the world of fairy tales. Ooo is ruled by princesses; Finn and Jake are a variation of the archetypical boy and his dog; there are antagonistic wizards that exist on the outskirts of society. Furthermore, Adventure Time is a show on Cartoon Network and inherits all the baggage that that entails. Cartoon Network has a standardized 11-minute length for episodes and a long tradition of TV shows that don't have overarching narratives – shows like Ed, Edd, and Eddy or Code Name: Kids Next Door followed the format set by American sitcoms wherein every episode ultimately returned to the status quo. Adventure Time, for its first three seasons, followed roughly this model, and always followed a model wherein each 11-minute episode was a completely contained narrative in itself. As such, Adventure Time demanded extremely efficient and unusual storytelling. In the episode Something Big, which ties up a large number of plot points and features a battle for the future of Ooo, events such as a recurring character's permanent death are dealt with quickly and unatmospherically; the whole plot is wrapped up within 8 minutes, leaving the remaining time to philosophical meanderings.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this first edition of me rambling about Adventure Time and film theory. Come back next week for more.
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