For those not in the know, The Amazing World of Gumball is Cartoon Network's latest animated comedy, created by animation and commercial director Ben Bocquelet. It is a British/American hybrid series produced by Cartoon Network Europe and is already gaining a substantial following on both sides of the pond. Here's the skinny:
The title character, one Gumball Watterson, is a rambunctious, hyperactive, impulsive, somewhat foolish and trouble-prone but still likable 12-year-old boy, who also happens to be a blue anthropomorphic cat. Gumball lives in the 'burbs along with (naturally) his family: his mother Nicole (also a blue anthro feline) is a sweet and nurturing working mom who has a job at the local rainbow factory (no, that's not a typo; they really manufacture and sell rainbows for profit) and also seems to have some anger issues which rise to the surface every now and again, so it's best not to cross her. Gumball's father Richard, a large pink rabbit, is a gregarious, mostly good-natured oaf of a guy who's a stay-at-home dad, in the sense that he literally stays home all day sleeping, goofing around and playing video games; Gumball's little sister Anais (another pink rabbit) is an adorable 4-year-old with a super-cute baby voice who is intelligent beyond her years: she's so advanced, in fact, that she attends her older brother's middle school, but for all of her wisdom, she's rarely listened to by Gumball or the other characters, because, well, she's only four. The final member of the Watterson clan is Darwin, Gumball's former pet goldfish who, sometime before the first episode, somehow randomly became sentient, growing legs and gaining the ability to breathe air and eat other foods besides fish flakes. The family subsequently adopted Darwin and he immediately assumed the role of Gumball's best friend, moving into the former's room and rarely leaving his side.
Strange, you say? Well, that's just for starters. Beyond that, the show gets even odder:
The suburban town that the Wattersons reside in, Elmore, resembles an ordinary real-life suburb (like the late FOX animated sitcom Sit Down, Shut Up, the animated characters live and interact with live-action backgrounds) but is more of a cross between Roger Rabbit's Toontown and the cantina scene in Star Wars. Every resident of Elmore is some sort of bizarre creature, and many of them offer a mishmash of various art and animation styles: Gumball's teacher Miss Simian is a crotchety, foul-tempered stop-motion ancient Chinese monkey, his principal Mr. Brown appears to be a living ball of brown hair (perhaps he's a distant relative of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family), Gumball's crush Penny is an anthropomorphic peanut with antlers, his other classmates include Bobert, a stop-motion white robot who resembles a hair dryer with 1 huge eye and sounds like Prof. Stephen Hawking's voice machine on high speed, Tina, the class bully, a king-sized fully CG rendered T-Rex with huge teeth, realistic scales and all, Carrie, a Goth girl who's in fact, a ghost, Banana Joe, a stop-motion banana with plastic googley-eyes, Teri, who I suppose is a bear, though she's actually a living cutout made of wrinkled paper, Masami, a stuck-up girl who'd have her nose in the air, if she had a nose; she's a living floating cloud, a giant purple furry something-or-other named Hector who is so damn big that we can't even see all of him on screen; we usually only get to see his legs or on one occasion, his butt (a homage to Hanna-Barbera's Great Grape Ape, perhaps?), a living balloon with a drawn-on face named Alan, who speaks with (not surprisingly) a helium-addled voice, a living lump of clay named Clayton, and others. Gumball's cranky, uppity neighbors the Robinsons are felt puppets who look like they failed their auditions for Sesame Street. There's also an arts-and-crafts made guy named Larry who seems to hold every menial job in town, a doughnut who's a cop, crumpled-up-wad-of-paper businessmen, 8-bit digital spiders, cube dogs and other things, all living under the warmth of a smiling sun.
Now, here's my personal views of what's good about Gumball and what (in my humble opinion) could be a little better:
The Pros: This show is cute, clever, energetic and genuinely funny. Unlike other shows such as Adventure Time or Aqua Teen Hunger Force (or as it's going by now, Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1), there aren't any times when you find yourself wondering what you just saw or what these guys are smoking, for all of Gumball's weirdness, the show still manages to be cohesive, identifiable and fun. I love how adept the show is at treating it's nutty cartoon universe and the events that happen in it like they're normal, as if getting possessed by the ghost in your class because she yearns to to have the ability to eat again or a teacher who's been in the education business for 300,000 years are just ordinary goings-on. I also like the subtle little gags like the aforementioned doughnut policeman or how the Robinsons' slacker son Rocky wears a lookalike of the famous AC/DC metal shirt with letters 'AB/CD' on it. It's like peeking in on the everyday lives of cartoon characters. The show's bizarre nature also gives us this bit from the episode "The End", in which Gumball and Darwin become convinced that an upcoming eclipse will trigger the end of the world, and when the eclipse finally comes, we're treated to this, one of my favorite gags in the series so far.
That's never not going to funny.
That's never not going to funny.
The Cons: Alright, now for the gripes. While the show can get downright hilarious when it hits, at other times it can be a tad uneven. The stories typically fall into 2 categories: domestic comedies involving Gumball's family, and slapstick entanglements involving Gumball's friends and classmates. Of the 2, I generally find the family-centric episodes to be more entertaining, whereas the school-and-friends centered stories (so far) tend to be among the weakest installments. I think that this is in large part because the school-based characters are all pretty flat and 1-dimensional, only good for 1 or 2 gags relating to who/what they are and not much else. They're a lot like all of those extraneous uncles, aunts and cousins on Disney's Meet the Robinsons: they pop on screen, treat us to their respective shticks and from then on they're really only there to take up space and fill in the numbers. A fellow poster at Toon Zone contends that given the chance, Gumball's classmates could each become strong characters and even be utilized in their own spotlight episodes; I don't entirely agree with this. Some of the characters might benefit from their own stories, but not all of them. For example, how does one build an entire episode around a balloon kid with no body? Or a kid with a jukebox for a head? Several of these characters simply don't lend themselves to major amounts of screen time. Then we come to characters like Gumball's girl-crush, Penny. On the one hand, I (like many others) find it refreshing to see that her budding romance with Gumball isn't 1-sided; Penny doesn't psychotically stalk Gumball nor does she treat him like scum as a veiled attempt to hid her affections for him; she likes him as much as he likes her. Fine and dandy, but why doesn't Penny do more? We really don't know anything about Penny except she likes Gumball and Gumball likes her back. She'd work a lot better if she had some quirks, foibles and failings of her own. As is stands, while Penny isn't an unappealing character, she's too underdeveloped to be interesting.
Speaking of which, this is admittedly a personal nitpick, but does every character on the show have to be an animal, food product come to life or some other assorted thingamabob? Would it kill the show's producers to toss in some cartoon humans (or at least humanoids) alongside the various thingies? Elmore's all creature population just reeks of overkill and "weird for weirdness' sake alone" mentality. I'd have rather the show's populace have been set up in a manner similar to that of the world of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball/Dr. Slump or even Dreamworks' Shrek movie franchise or WB's The Looney Tunes Show, where the society is predominantly made up of humans with the occasional anthropomorphic animal or other thing. I admit it's partially because I'm not a huge fan of anthropomorphism in general; I can take it when it's necessary for understanding who and what a character is, but when characters are anthropomorphisized to the point that they're just people in anthro skins, that's when it crosses over from cute to creepy to me. In the case of some of the cast, it works. For example, Carrie is a ghost, she wouldn't work as anything else. Tina is a T-Rex, she wouldn't work as anything else. Bobert is a robot, he wouldn't work as anything else. But does Penny really need to be an antlered peanut? She could've been a humanoid and it wouldn't have affected the show that dramatically. And does Tobias really need to be a...well, what the heck is Tobias anyway? he looks like a Technicolor blob in a headband. Even the Wattersons didn't really have to be animals (except for Darwin, obviously), but I'm willing to give this a pass, since the creators likely rendered them as such for distinctiveness, and lots of cartoonists do this.
Regarding the Wattersons themselves: while the "female Wattersons are smart, male Wattersons are stupid" dynamic can get a little annoying at times, I don't kind it that much. I just wish that the female Wattersons would get a little more time in the limelight. The mother Nicole is one of my favorite characters on the show; she was great in "The DVD" and "The Spoon" and I'm glad to see that her role as the responsible breadwinner doesn't also mean that she's the least frequently seen family member, like the mothers on Johnny Test or the late Out of Jimmy's Head. If the writers would just boost Nicole's appearances a little more, I'd be a happy fella. (I'd also like to actually see this rainbow factory at some point on the show, even if only from the outside; it's just such a wonderfully surreal concept that I'd like to see get a little more attention.) Same goes for Anais, another character that I really like, but sadly hasn't gotten as much to do as I might like. There are times when Anais just...disappears. Even in stories that take place largely at the house like "The Laziest", "The Prank" and several portions of "The Gi", Anais just isn't around; you don't even see her in the backgrounds. Where is she during these moments? At MENSA meetings?
In my opinion, the family's weakest link is Richard, the dad. I know some people who flat-out hate the character; while I don't hate Richard or even dislike him, I do take issue with the level of incompetence placed on him. I don't mind Richard being a goofy dad, but he could be shown as being capable of some domestic duties, like cooking and cleaning. (In "The Responsible", Anais states that she's the one who prepares the boys' breakfasts in the mornings.) when I first read about Richard, I figured he'd be like Hugh, the father on Johnny Test, and I'd like to see him take on a few of those traits so he'd actually come off like a father and less like a big goofy guy who shares the house with the family. (And I never thought I'd ever say that any element of a show should be more like Johnny Test.)
But despite those little nitpicks, I'm enjoying what I've seen of The Amazing World of Gumball so far. I give it a solid B; if the little things I mentioned could be spiffed up, it would get an A from me for sure.
I'll leave with the show's opening. Cartoon Network only runs and edited and abridged version of the show's opening title sequence; apparently, the full opening "didn't test well" with audiences. So here, submitted for your approval is the complete opening title sequence to The Amazing World of Gumball.
-Wow, that was a deal-breaker, wasn't it?
