the cozy, festive magic of fall favorite Over the Garden Wall • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

Over the Garden Wall gradually plays out that natural progression. Toward the series’ start, golden rays of light filter through ochre and rust leaves as wild turkeys rummage through the forest. True to the Unknown’s vastness, the transformation doesn’t necessarily occur linearly. Arguably the episode most evocative of an idyllic Halloween, ‘Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee’ traverses fields of pumpkins beneath a moody gray sky; in the following ‘Schooltown Follies’, a warm verdancy feels like summer’s lingering caress. Still, by the final episodes, winter subsumes fall, and a harsh snowstorm consumes the Unknown as Greg and Wirt face peril.

McHale grew up in New Jersey before attending CalArts, in perennially temperate Southern California. Not one for the Hollywood hustle, he has long since moved back to the East Coast, but during his college years, a fall visit to Concord, Massachusetts, provided inspiration—both as seasonal respite and as the picture-book ideal of Americana. A longtime lover of silent film, opera and historical oddities, he looked across mediums for the elaborate animation style of Over the Garden Wall, including magic lantern slides, photographs of New England foliage and  Hudson River School landscape paintings. Victorian chromolithography and vintage Halloween postcards are another fascination. “There’s a certain softness to those images that really appeals to me,” McHale says. “If you look up really close, it’s lots of little dots. They feel like real little paintings. And since they’re not usually portraying any specific story, it’s easy to start daydreaming stories for them.”

The team also looked to artists such as Edward Lear, José Guadalupe Posada and, in an especially thematically resonant nod, Gustave Doré—i.e., the French Romantic best known for his wood engravings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. An 1890s McLoughlin Bros. board game called “Game of Frog Pond” provided a leap pad for Greg’s amphibian friend. (Of the frog’s many monikers, McHale tells me that his favorite name might be one that was cut: Professor Nougat of the Himalayas.)

“We wanted to make it so no one can place when it was actually made. It could have been made in the forties, then gotten lost and found again,” Cross reflects in The Art of Over the Garden Wall. Elsewhere in the book, McHale expands on the sentiment: “We didn’t want it to feel like a watered-down version of classic animation, so we tried to get into the mindset of early filmmakers. What did they look to for inspiration? They were looking at classic literature, illustrations, and artwork (in addition to the film work of their contemporaries).”