(The Disneycember logo is shown, before showing clips from The Owl House)
Doug (vo): It's so weird to think years after Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, these series that practically invented a new genre, there still technically isn't a name for that genre. I always just kind of called them cartoon epics, because it's not like Batman or X-Men or any of those animated series where everybody's supposed to look pretty realistic. These are clearly cartoons. The features are exaggerated, usually for comedic effect, zany slapstick can happen and so forth, but in the long run, it slowly reveals itself as a big, epic story. The Owl House definitely falls into that category, and as these cartoon epics go, this is probably the fastest I got into one of these shows.
Premise[]
Doug (vo): Luz is an awkward teenager who's into awkward things and sadly can't make any friends, which I'll be honest, I don't buy at all. You're telling me this kid couldn't make friends with these type of kids or these type of kids or any of these types you see at any school? (Photos of various types of kids are shown, including cool kids, regular kids and nerdy kids) Well, anyway, her mother is sending her to a camp that's hopefully going to make her more normal, but when she accidentally stumbles into a fantasy world called the Boiling Isles, she decides to spend her summer there, hoping her mother never puts together that she's not actually at camp. While there, she befriends a witch named Eda, an adorable nobody-knows-what named King, a hilariously obnoxious doorknocker named Hooty, and several other witches, demons and just all-around strange creatures.
Review[]
Doug (vo): If you've been watching my reviews and you know what I like, you can probably tell I gravitated towards this world right away. It's funny, one of the subplots in the show is about combining different elements, because that's probably what I like the most about this show. On top of it being very, very funny and having very likable characters, the premise seems to be all about combining things that have been done before, but putting them together to make something new. And I love when a show does that. To me, this show feels like a mix between Kiki's Delivery Service and Beetlejuice. It has the heart and wonder of Kiki, but also the dark, twisted humor of Beetlejuice. Honestly, this would probably be my favorite out of all the cartoon epic series if it wasn't for just one thing that drove me absolutely insane, but we'll get to that in a bit. And, honestly, I don't think it's going to bother other people as much as it does me.
(Footage focusing on Eda and Luz is shown)
Doug (vo): The characters, on top of being really, really funny, are pretty instantly likable. Even ones you're not supposed to like, for the most part, evolve in a way where they become really complex and interesting. Eda is an outlaw who's constantly on the run, but at the same time is always selling human stuff. It's almost like Little Mermaid how she misinterprets what everything is. So Luz constantly explains what everything is while Eda agrees to teach her all about being a witch. I always love this setup where the person showing you this kind of dangerous world is also kind of a dangerous person herself. She's a charlatan, she breaks the rules, and sometimes, they're good rules to break, and sometimes, they're not very good rules to break. Combining that with Luz's constant need to want to discover and explore, it just leads to this really great creative and fun world to explore.
(Footage focusing on the locations featured in the series is shown)
Doug (vo): What I really like about this show is unlike a lot of shows I've been talking about recently where they'll kind of have a really underwhelming first season where they just stay in one spot, here, they definitely have a spot they return to with the Owl House, which on its own, is actually very imaginative and holds a bunch of secrets, but they'll still venture out and go to different places. Some of them are a little familiar, like, there is a witch school which is very clearly Hogwarts, and, yeah, that's not really my thing. But I will admit, what they do with it is funny. They even do make some good jokes about Hogwarts in there. My stuff is more when they go to different places that have different creatures and even learn different types of magic.
(Footage focusing on the worldbuilding is shown)
Doug (vo): I really love what they do with the worldbuilding, where Luz actually figures out a different way to use this magic. It's a little complicated to explain and I guess I don't want to give away too much, but it ties into drawing, which is really great for Luz, because she obviously loves to do drawings and fanart and stuff. And it's also great because she has to discover it. Eda kind of teaches her, kind of gives her a few ideas, but then she kind of evolves it. There's a lot of things that work that way where, again, you're taking these different elements that you're familiar with, but you combine them in a way that has been combined before and you make something that's really exciting, fun and new.
(Footage focusing on King is shown)
Doug (vo): It's actually one of the few shows where I was more okay with the social dilemmas and the side adventures than I was with the overall big story. There's a little bit of a mystery of where King comes from, and, honestly, the reveal is good. I mean, he does have a good backstory, but if you never, ever told me what his backstory was, I'd be okay with it. The character is just so likable, and I love seeing him interact with everybody, that I would still be satisfied.
(Footage focusing on Amity is shown)
Doug (vo): Even some of the characters you think are going to be one note and boring really come around and become some of the best things in the show. Like, look at this character named Amity. Just from that intro, don't you immediately know what this character is going to be? She's going to be the bully, she's going to be the Malfoy or the It punks, just the characters that are there to only be the antagonist, nothing interesting at all. But not only do they give her a tragic backstory that ties into her parents, which, yeah, okay, we've seen something like that before, but they also give her a love interest, which, okay, that's two things that you've seen in other series before. But combining those two together with what is usually just a side bully character and it's all done in the first season suddenly transforms her from being the least interesting character to the most interesting character. I like her connection with her parents, I find it interesting. Her little crush that she's afraid to tell is also really kind of adorkable. Even when some series do decide to finally evolve their villains, in my opinion, they're usually done too late. Like, Malfoy, again, is done in, like, what? Movie 6? So you got, like, five movies of him being a complete drag. But here, it feels right she should start off as kind of the snobby bully and evolve over the first season. She doesn't feel like she's there just to be an obstacle, she is a fully fleshed out character...
(Footage focusing on the main villain, Bellos, is shown, along with footage of Eda dealing with her curse)
Doug (vo): ...which is more than I can say for the main villain of the show. Okay, let me get to the one thing I really didn't care for in this series. I don't like Bellos. Bellos is the big bad guy of the series, and maybe 20 years ago, he would have worked. But nowadays, he's just Mumm-ra, the Horned King, the Fire Lord, villains that worked fine in those properties years ago, but nowadays, it's just an irredeemable monster that's clearly trying to tie into the commentary the show is trying to get across. I found this aggravating for three reasons. One: Like I said, I think he's boring. Near the end, they kind of have fun making his design really creepy and cool, like this is almost in PG-13 territory, but for the most part, he's just the big, boring baddie. Second: I thought the show was doing much better with its commentary when it wasn't being so direct. For example, Eda has a curse in the show, and she has to learn how to live with it, and the people around her have to learn how to live with it. And there's a lot of ways you can interpret that. You can interpret that as a physical disease or a mental disease... (A caption reading "*disorder" is shown briefly) ...or even just being socially awkward or not fitting in or trying to figure out how to fit in. There's so many ways you could interpret it. And there's a lot of commentary like that in this, things kind of have this broad range. With Bellos, there's only one thing he could represent, and it's so on the nose, and you get it the first time you see him, yet you have to go through half the series with them hammering in this message. And I just don't feel like they're adding anything that new to it. Third: So much of the series is not judging a book by its cover. Luz comes to this scary, creepy place, but there's actually a lot of charm to it and a lot of good to it, and it's all about accepting others and finding different points of view and maybe people you think are scary aren't scary...except for that guy, he totally is. Yeah, he looks like a monster, he is a monster, don't even trust him for a second, there's no good in him. If they went out of the way to show the human side to this guy, like, why he believes what he believes, which they do hint at a little bit with his backstory, which I also didn't think was that well done. How can nobody put together who this guy was? But they just don't try to show any humanity to this guy. They just say, "He's evil. Boom, done". And I think that's really betraying the message. You can have a guy get to a point where he is beyond saving, but I think you need to show he was a person who could be influenced like any of us could, because that's the idea. It's like The Lorax, anyone could become this guy. But it became like...The Lorax, where there's just this generic bad guy we can throw all our hate into and say, "Boo! It's all his fault! Boo!", and the show just feels like it's smarter and better than that.
(Footage focusing on the series finale is shown)
Doug (vo): Because of this, we also get the major climax we see in all of these shows now. Don't you know there's going to be some major monster they have to fight? Don't you know it's going to all tie into some big, obvious moral? Don't you know when one of the main characters apparently dies, they're not really dead? (Clips from Amphibia are shown briefly) Didn't I already see half a season where the main characters spend time in our world and then have to go back to the fictional world, and a whole bunch of glow-y stuff happens with people crying and somebody realizing who they really were all this ti-? It just feels so done now. To me, a real threat would be something like a cute little cuddly character, like the one from Cats Don't Dance (Darla Dimple) that was trying to make the world all bright and colorful and not so strange and weird.
(Footage focusing on The Collector is shown alongside Bellos)
Doug (vo): But ironically enough, they do give us that. Yeah, there's this kid character called The Collector, who has a really interesting backstory and wants to make everything bright and colorful, and everybody's his toys and everything, and they do flesh out the human side of him while also making him a villain. And this is great, this is what I would have loved the whole show to be around. But even when he starts to be the main focus, in comes Bellos again, because, you know, we got to put our obvious commentary over the story, and for me, it was so dull, so generic, and so recycled.
(Various footage from the show resumes showing)
Doug (vo): But, okay, before you kill me, that's my personal take. And I think objectively, for this type of show in modern day, this is still a character that works fine. This is a show that's also trying to entertain the kids, and they are going to throw in some tropes that, yes, maybe adults have seen over and over and we're tired of and we caught on to, but kids wouldn't have yet. But I guess when a show like this starts off making fun of certain tropes, like one of my favorite episodes is kind of disproving the whole idea of the Chosen One, like why it's been overdone, it can be manipulative, and maybe it shouldn't be done so much, but then kind of continues with these tropes that's also being done too much, it's kind of manipulative, too, it feels like a downgrade. But again, objectively, I can't say it's bad. It still gets across the message well enough, it still unites the characters together, it still makes the bad guys look bad, but have a little wiggle room for good. Well, again, some of them, not the main baddie. But for the part of the show that has earned the right to just be a kids' show, this is okay. But I feel like shows like this have two more gos with this type of character, someone who's just irredeemably evil and that's it. Even Jack Horner is funny. You can make him irredeemably evil, just add something unique to it. And Bellos, to me, is nothing unique, but he's not enough to ruin the show by any means, just drag it down from what I would pretty much consider a perfect show otherwise.
Final thought[]
Doug (vo): But also, like I said, I don't think everyone's going to have the same reaction I did, because I do think this show is trying to hit everyone, but let's face it, it's trying to hit certain groups of people more than others. I do think there are going to be quite a few folks that are going to connect to it more than I am, or at least certain elements more than I am. For me, I connected to the strange world, the strange characters, and the great comedy. I did hear a lot about how this show was supposed to have more seasons, but Disney kind of screwed them over, so they had to squeeze a lot in the last few episodes and kind of call that a season, but honestly, I thought a lot of that worked better than what most people were building up. A lot of people were saying it's really awkward sometimes, and I didn't really get that. Again, all the awkward stuff, I kind of just got from the Bellos character, to a point where, like I said, I really wish The Collector was the big bad guy in all this. But, yes, at the same time, this is a show that also kind of wants to celebrate its tropes. It wants to also incorporate all the tropes that something like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls and so forth have also incorporated. And it's hard to fault it on that, especially when the main character is obsessed with shows and animes and drawings and stuff like that, it makes sense. So I definitely strongly recommend this. If you like things that are weird and odd and crazy, bizarre worlds, this is definitely for you. And if not, well, you're probably not watching me, anyway. The problems I think it has, I don't think everyone else is going to consider a problem, so either you're going to get a great show that's going to have some distracting faults or you're just going to get a great show. It seems to have a diehard fanbase, and it isn't difficult to see why. It's very likable, very creative, very funny, combines a lot of what many animation audiences enjoy, yet does so in a way that creates something really exciting and new. It may not be perfect, but goddamn, it comes pretty close.
(A scene showing Luz and King flying across the ocean and into the sky is shown)