Over The Garden Wall is a Halloween staple for many. The 10-episode miniseries aired on Cartoon Network in 2014 and it follows the adventures of brothers Wirt and Greg as they try to find their way home after being lost in the woods.
A lot of the strange things they find in the woods are actually based on American folk tales and urban legends. This gives a deeper meaning to the series that might escape notice the first time you watch it. It took me a few watches to notice all the details.
1. The Beast
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The Beast is based on a lot of things but most resembles a wendigo. Wendigos are a creature from Native American mythology. They are corrupted humans who have eaten the flesh of another human. This often happens when people are lost in the woods together and are forced to eat each other out of desperation.The Beast consumes the souls of the kids who get lost in the woods by using their essence to feed his lantern, so it makes sense that his roots are in a creature closely associated with cannibalism. Like the Beast, wendigos are symbols of corruption, greed, decay, and gluttony.
2. The Schoolhouse
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One weird detour in the series involves Wirt and Greg traveling to an old-fashioned schoolhouse filled with anthropomorphic animals being taught by a human teacher. This is a new take on a traditional method of storytelling for children.
In early children's stories, animals were used to communicate fables and morality tales because animals are easily recognizable symbols. The pastel colors of the schoolhouse scene are reminiscent of Beatrix Potter's stories about mischievous rabbits and other woodland creatures.
The schoolhouse scene subverts a lot of the children's book tropes by having the anthropomorphic animals act more like animals than humans, and having other weird things derail the plot.
3. Beatrice
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Beatrice is named after and based on a character in Dante's Inferno. However, while Dante's Beatrice leads him to salvation, the Beatrice in Over the Garden Wall does the opposite, at least at first. Bluebirds are also symbols of heaven and the afterlife.
4. Pumpkin Village
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The members of the pumpkin village seem to spend most of their time harvesting crops and celebrating the harvest. However, the meaning of the word "harvest" becomes a lot broader when we learn more about them.
Halloween is partially a harvest festival, and the combination of celebrating the prosperity of the life of the previous year and the reminder of our own mortality as leaves fall around us can lead to late autumn being an unsettling time of year.
5. Lorna
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Lorna is a girl who lives with her grandmother and is kept constantly busy with chores despite being ill. Wirt and Greg see this and assume the worst. They try to help her escape her situation and find out that her "illness" is actually a demon possessing her.
This is reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials where women who were outcasts from society were accused of witchcraft and hung. This event became the shining example of everything wrong with Puritan repression and social stratification.
6. Black Turtles
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These little guys appear many times throughout Over The Garden Wall, though they're not really plot important. As symbols, turtles are very important to the Native Americans and often associated with the Earth and primordial forces.
Turtles and tortoises can also appear in myths as trickster figures who lead animals on paths of destruction. More generally, they are symbols of steady persistence.
