Wander Over Yonder is deceptively simple. The bubbly animated series, which began airing on Disney XD in 2013, follows Wander (voiced by Wreck-It Ralph star Jack McBrayer), a sunny intergalactic traveler with a floppy hat who travels across the universe with his trusty steed Sylvia (April Winchell). They get into wacky misadventures, run afoul of the evil Lord Hater (Keith Ferguson) and encounter all manner of strange creature. But they do it with smiles on their faces and a spring in their step. And while the basic setup of Wander Over Yonder may seem fairly standard for an animated kids’ show, it is startling complex, particularly with its approach to visual and narrative storytelling.

The entire show looks like it was filmed from inside a black light poster, seemingly inspired by prog rock album covers from the 1970s (Wander definitely has the look and feel of an optimistic folk musician). Often times the visuals are pushed to almost experimental extremes, and the narratives blow past commonplace formality for something more charming and uncommon.

Tonight, one of the episodes that really exemplifies Wander Over Yonder’s commitment to visual and narrative inventiveness, airs on Disney XD. Entitled “The Breakfast,” which sees the lovable Wander waking up and getting ready for his day, along with Lord Hater getting ready at the same time. The entire episode is presented in split-screen, with action taking place on both sides of the device, with jokes playing off one another and occasionally interacting. If you want to know what makes Wander Over Yonder so special, this 11-minute episode is a good place to start.

“It was about trying to create this world of science fiction before Star Wars,” Wander Over Yonder creator McCracken explained. “So everything before 1977, everything from old science fiction book covers, to psychedelia, to early Terry Gilliam animation. And it’s also heavily influenced by Muppets. I really like the simplicity of Jim Henson designs and I try to incorporate that.”

And while Wander Over Yonder flawlessly combines gentle surrealism with actual danger, McCracken said a chief imperative towered above all others: the show’s inherent silliness, and that the show’s sweetness influenced its look. “It’s shamelessly cartoon-y and we always embrace the silliness. There are deeper stories and the characters have real emotions and real feelings but the overall tone of the show is fun. So we wanted to come up with a design style that was fun and cool to look at.” To that end they created a “lava lamp” aesthetic and applied it to everything. “It’s all gloopy and soft and there’s not a lot of hard edges or sharp angles.” It’s true that everything on Wander Over Yonder looks super huggable, even if it’s supposed to be something scary and weird.

When coming up with the split-screen episode, McCracken had to ask himself some questions. “The way I always approach every one of my cartoons is by saying, What’s something that we haven’t done? What’s a fun experiment? And I think of every cartoon not as individual episodes but as little sketches or little films. So it was a matter of noting that Hater is an eternal pessimist who has everything handed to him and Wander is this eternal optimist who lives out in nature and has to work hard for everything. So we thought it’d be a neat character study to do a point/counter-point of how they get breakfast in the morning.”

We mentioned that we couldn’t think of any animated series that had done something like this; McCracken couldn’t either. Not that it fazed him. “That was what I got really excited about. Can we do this? Can we make two simultaneous cartoons where each joke plays point/counter-point? It was really tricky to figure out because the one thing we needed to do was direct the audience with where to look at any given time. We didn’t want to play both of them as noise. We needed to lead you to choose a side. So all of that was very meticulously crafted.”

Something rendered entirely in split-screen is pretty unheard of. When we watched “The Breakfast” episode of Wander Over Yonder, we immediately thought of the work of suspense director Brian De Palma, whose work, particularly in the ‘70s (the same period of pop art that Wander Over Yonder references), made extensive use of split-screen. But McCracken’s reference point wasn’t so heady. “I had recently seen some commercials that had did that,” McCracken admitted. Hey, we’re sold.

The kind of playful experimentation presented in “The Breakfast” isn’t a fluke, either. McCracken points out that there were two episodes in the show’s first season (“The Day” and “The Night”), “the way those cartoons are designed, the last frame of each one loops up into the next one. So you could watch those cartoons in a perpetual loop forever.” He also points out to the “Rashomon-style” approach to the Christmas and Halloween episodes of the show last season (“The Gift” and “The Giftening”), where Wander’s charitable good deeds are seen, in Lord Hater’s eyes, as truly terrifying. “We took the same story but looked at the other side of it,” McCracken explained.

And don’t worry, the series’ intoxicating mixture of far-out visuals and bold storytelling isn’t going to stop anytime soon. McCracken is particularly excited about an extra-long musical episode (set to air sometime next year). “We did a full-on 22-minute musical and what we wanted to do was treat it like a real, classical Disney musical,” he enthused. “So we did it like they used to do it with the Sherman Brothers where the composer was in the story room with a keyboard while we were watching the story. So we would break it with our composer, Andy Bean. It’s something we’re incredibly proud of. It’s incredibly ambitious. It’s going to be a lot of fun.” Like we said: you can search the entire galaxy, but there isn’t a show quite like Wander Over Yonder.

New, increasingly brilliant episodes of Wander Over Yonder air on Monday nights at 9 p.m. on Disney XD. They’re worth the journey.

Posted 5 years Ago