Ubbe Ert Iwwerks is not, despite the way it sounds when you say it in a dark room, an ancient and irreversible curse. It was the name of a boy born in Missouri in 1901, the sort of terminally Germanic name that makes “Ub Iwerks” maybe not sound so bad by comparison, so that’s what he went by when he started making cartoons.



Ub was just eighteen when he met a boy his age from Chicago at the Kansas City art studio where they both worked, and they became fast friends. They soon moved jobs together, becoming commercial illustrators at the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company, but as technology advanced, the opportunity to make drawings come alive seemed too small for ads. Ub’s friend decided to jump into this new medium, and Ub followed suit, becoming the chief animator for Laugh-O-Gram Cartoons when he was twenty-one.

Laugh-O-Gram didn’t last very long, so Ub followed his colleague to Los Angeles to develop a series starring a live-action girl and a cartoon cat called the Alice Comedies. It was a moderate success, enough that Ub was tapped to design a character for Universal Studios to star in a new series of shorts. He created a cartoon rabbit that Universal loved, but big businesses being big businesses, the studio hired away most of the staff behind these cartoons, leaving Ub and his friend-turned-colleague-turned-boss high and dry. Determined to never paint another cel with a character he didn’t have rights to, Ub’s boss roughly sketched out a new critter that Ub perfected and animated in a series of new cartoons.

(To be clear: by “animated,” I don’t mean he just directed animation or drew storyboards. Ub literally hand-animated the whole darn things, churning out cartoons at almost full-studio speed pretty much by himself.)

Anyway, the first such short his studio released, but the third produced, was called Steamboat Willie. And while it helped put Ub’s boss Walt and their character Mickey on the map, Ub would never see the same level of success. Because a big part of the story that I haven’t mentioned yet is that Walt, for all his incredible creative vision, wasn’t a tool so much as a toolbox.



Ub Iwerks would soon animate the very first Silly Symphony in 1929, The Skeleton Dance, featuring a growing group of skeletons emerging from a graveyard to, well, dance. Less famous is its 1937 sequel, animated by Iwerks after leaving Disney’s toxic work environment seven years earlier. Skeleton Frolic shows just how quickly the medium was evolving, featuring full color and far smoother animation. Ub would keep honing his art for the rest of his life, outliving his old friend by a few years but remaining a background figure in history despite his gigantic role in the founding of the most prominent entertainment empire in the world.

So while it’s laughable to imagine that a trained animator like Pat McHale would be unfamiliar with the iconic Skeleton Dance, it’s less of a given that Skeleton Frolic floats too high in his reference pool. I honestly don’t know either way for sure, but while Skeleton Dance is the classic, only its sequel features a moment where a skull is replaced with a pumpkin.

“Say, aren’t you a little too early?”

The Old Grist Mill had a lot on its plate: it needed to introduce our characters, their goal, the dangerous force that they must avoid, and the Unknown as a place. We ease off a bit for Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee, so it feels a bit more like a “normal” episode, but it still pulls its weight by properly welcoming Beatrice to the party. After all, these episodes were released two at a time, so it makes sense to view both as the “first.”

Beatrice doubles down on that initial impression of a helpful bird with an attitude: she now takes the role of a small trapped animal that needs help in exchange for a favor, a staple of fables and myths that would prime us to see her as a traditional mystical guide if not for every single thing she says. She insists she’s not magical, and doesn’t even wait to be rescued before she starts grumbling at Greg and Wirt. Her advice to see Adelaide of the Pasture quickly morphs to hectoring when the boys decide to instead go to Pottsfield, casting doubt on the purity of her intentions. Again, we could’ve had a story where Beatrice feigned sweetness and her betrayal was a massive mid-series twist, but it’s so much better that we instead get consistent characterization throughout for our third lead.

Over the Garden Wall never forgets that the reason Beatrice is a bird in the first place is because she was a foul-tempered kid who threw a rock at another bird. We don’t know it now, but she’s actually the second character we see in the series (right after Jason Funderburker), a human with a dog glancing up at a bird flying through the branches. If nastiness is the cause of her curse, it makes little sense for her disposition to improve now that she has to eat maggots instead of waffles.

But she’s still a kid—meaning a teen, at this point I see everyone below the age of 25 as a “kid”—so she’s not evil so much as ornery. She’s also not slick enough to be a proper villain, regularly fumbling through her plans (her hesitant “That’s the…bluebird rules” is Melanie Lynskey’s best line reading of the episode) and outright telling Greg to ditch Wirt when subterfuge fails her. Her incompetence makes her a natural fit with the group, even and especially as she projects false wisdom.

Over the Garden Wall is a story about the in-between, the stage between summer and winter, wakefulness and sleep, life and death. Through her name alone, Beatrice enhances this theme: she might not be as angelic as her namesake in the Divine Comedy, but she’s nonetheless a guide familiar with a strange afterlife helping souls that got lost in the woods. So it’s fitting that we learn her name in an episode explicitly about the dead from the perspective of two living boys who are eager to stay that way.

Wirt and Greg’s actual near-death experience that we’ll learn of in The Unknown colors the entire series, and Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee thrives by showing that they’re not just traveling to the afterlife, but intruding upon it. The finality of death makes the residents of Pottsfield unaccustomed to temporary visitors, but our wanderers don’t belong there yet.

Because this is an adventure with horror elements rather than a full-on horror, the Pottsfielders don’t remedy the problem by trying to kill our heroes: in fact, everything just sort of works out. The pumpkinfolk are creepy, but they’re only having a celebration. Enoch is even creepier, but he’s a civic-minded leader whose punishment is light and fair. And even when we learn that the citizens are skeletons, it doesn’t mean they’re bad people. The only aspect of Pottsfield that’s actually worth being afraid of are the giant turkeys, because I mean yikes.

Nearly every episode of Over the Garden Wall involves a case of mistaken identity, because this is also a story about the nebulous nature of truth (and that’s a Rock Fact!). The Old Grist Mill has an unintentionally disguised figure in Beatrice’s dog, who’s easily confused for the Beast by two boys who don’t know any better. But here we get our first case of characters disguising themselves—the skeletons as pumpkins, and as we’ll learn much later, the black cat as Enoch—and it’s presented as unexpectedly wholesome. Lies abound in the Unknown, but remember, some of them are the loveliest lies of all.



Still, knowing that Enoch and the gang are friendly doesn’t stop them from being unnerving, especially with Chris Isaak’s haunting voice thrumming from an giant painted face. It’s a necessary factor not only for the tone of the episode and series, but to provide a good portion of the episode’s humor: the sheer relief that nothing terrible happens is enough to lighten your mood (although a tiny ball and chain built for a bird also helps). We’ve now had two episodes where a threat turns out to be innocuous, a trend that will soon be met by innocuous-seeming characters turning out to be threats. Nothing is as it appears in the Unknown.



The ambiguity of Pottsfield has a fascinating effect on Wirt. In our last episode, he kept going back and forth about the Woodsman even when welcomed into the safety of a cabin and given the promise of help. Here, there are red flags galore in this weird pumpkin town, but Wirt’s uncertainty cedes to a stubborn insistence that everything is fine. It speaks to the writing team and Elijah Wood that this reversal feels totally natural: he’s still nervous and unsure of himself, and rather than having actual blind faith in the pumpkinfolk, his forced confidence is an overreaction to The Old Grist Mill. There, he didn’t trust a suspicious-looking stranger, and it ended terribly. Here he decides to listen to that stranger’s advice despite several safer-seeming alternatives in hopes of avoiding that mistake, and while all ends well, his lesson about being too wary is now joined by a lesson about being too trusting.

At the risk of writing a paragraph that’s meaningless to anyone who isn’t old enough to have watched Digimon in the late 90s, Wirt’s attitude is delightfully similar to that show’s stick-in-the-mud, Joe Kido. One of the things that makes Digimon way better than it had any right to be is that it’s a story about child heroes featuring realistic children, which means several of them really don’t wanna participate in a life-threatening adventure. As the oldest and most responsible member of the group (not to mention the ambitious son of a doctor, granting him exceptional medical knowledge for a kid), Joe is the natural choice to lead the team on paper. But he’s too reliant on real-world logic to function well in a wonderland, so his practical advice that would be super helpful in most situations (call for help whenever possible, conserve resources for a long journey, don’t throw yourself into dangerous situations) ends up making him a killjoy most of the time.

Wirt has a similar aversion to adventure, preferring safety over a quest bestowed by a talking bird. He follows the road and assumes the town they find will have someone who can help out, refusing to let the weirdness of Pottsfield deter him from this faith in simple solutions until Greg finds a skeleton. And even then, when he reacts reasonably and concludes that he’s digging his own grave, he’s proven wrong again. He follows the path of least resistance so rigidly that he contemplates just staying in Pottsfield rather than thinking up a new plan. Thankfully he’s in a safe enough neck of the woods that this attitude doesn’t get him or Greg hurt, and his missteps here allow him develop just enough savvy to survive as the going gets rougher.

Greg remains Wirt’s opposite, decisively following his own path to the point of straight-up ignoring his brother. Beatrice is often paired with Wirt while Greg does his own thing, but she and Greg get a ton of time together here. He’s the one that frees her in the first place, the one that she tells her name to, the one she dances with at the party (sidenote, Greg needs to be taught about consent), and the one she runs away with while Wirt stalls for time in the graveyard. It’s a fun dynamic, but a bit redundant when Greg has such a similar dynamic with Wirt, so it’s a wise move to have Beatrice bounce off the older brother more as the series continues.

There’s honestly not much more to say about Greg for now, except that he’s a far smoother version of comic relief than he was in The Old Grist Mill. The blithely accepting kid we see here is pretty much what we’ll get for the rest of the series, and he doesn’t even break out his rock. This isn’t to say he’s not a joy to be around, as his merry demeanor is a welcome change of pace from Wirt’s and now Beatrice’s negative outlooks and the frightening residents of Pottsfield, but there’s not much to analyze about him in Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee. Even Wirt Junior has more character development, suddenly capable of doing human-like stretches after a stint of acting like a normal frog. But don’t worry, Greg gets plenty of focus in our next episode.

Just as The Old Grist Mill begins and ends with a silhouette of Beatrice among the branches (not counting the cold open, of course), Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee begins and ends with a leaf. But there’s so much more of a story this time, because on top of the swelling strings and the lush fall colors, there’s a distinct change from beginning to end. We start by seeing the leaf break loose from a tree and blow away in the wind, and this moment is followed by birds flying south, a chirping cricket, and a troop of turkeys to establish a general autumnal tone. But those strings return during our last conversation, lingering on as we return to that leaf. All seems well as our heroes continue to wander, but the music starts to sour as the leaf gets caught in a fence, struggling to escape as we fade out.

Wirt has shifted his hopes from the Woodsman’s bad directions to Adelaide, and Beatrice has hinted at a deeper backstory that she refuses to explain, and while both of these trails might end as simply as the Pottsfielders’ happy celebration, that leaf tells a different tale. In a story about the exploring the in-between, there are few worse fates than getting stuck.

Rock Factsheet

No Rock Facts today, unless you count the Fact that Pottsfielders don’t like Rocks.

Where have we come, and where shall we end?