Centaurworld

 My stomach has not been kind to me this past week. I had thought that I’d get a good walk in to help balance it out, but this morning it’s pouring rain so I suppose that is not going to happen this weekend.

Still debating when would be a good time to see The Batman.

I was between talking about this and talking about General Grievous (comparing him in 2003 Clone Wars to later appearances), and landed on this because it’s more out there.

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On Centaurworld

So I watched Centaurworld on Netflix recently. It’s weird. It’s really freaking weird. I don’t think it ever reaches Adventure Time weird, but then again I don’t know that there’s very much that does.

[Side note: I think someone out there should do a dissertation on the influence of Adventure Time on modern animation.]

The premise goeth thusly: There is a Rider, and there is a Horse. They’re very close. They are transporting an artifact through a war-torn apocalyptic landscape when they’re attacked by the enemy, an army of minotaurs. Horse and Rider get separated and Horse finds herself awake in Centaurworld, a magical, colorful, musical world populated by different kinds of centaurs. Horse can talk now, suddenly, and finds herself adopted by a herd that helps her on her quest to return to the human world and reunite with Rider.

For reference, in the show, “centaur” is loosely defined as any being that is part animal with a human torso coming out of where the neck would be. Most of the “centaurs” we meet are not part horse. Out of the main herd, none of the centaurs are: Wammawink is part alpaca, Zulius is part zebra, Durpleton is part giraffe, Glendale is part antelope, and Ched is part finch. Likewise, it seems that “minotaur” means any animal-headed humanoid, but we don’t see that many unarmored for most of the show’s run. The one we do see is a reptilian figure, but is notably still called a minotaur.

The show is very silly, for the most part. There are hints throughout the first season that there’s something much darker going on in the background, that Centaurworld wasn’t always a happy cheerful place. There are episodes heavily relying on Horse’s despair at being separated from Rider and how she’s afraid that the changes she  makes in Centaurworld will prevent her from even being recognized. And then we get to the season finale, which properly introduces the Nowhere King, the monster that resides in the rift between Centaurworld and the human world.

Also he gets this creepy lullaby-sound theme song.

One might think that after that the show turns serious, but it doesn’t really? The serious moments become more frequent, but (to the annoyance of viewers who wanted things to be darker) the show remains incredibly chipper for a while before getting to the final battle–though there are some fairly dark scenes as we see what the Nowhere King is up to.

While I think the series is good and the finale is excellent, I think the fact that the story doesn’t play to these darker elements plays against the show to an extent. There is an emotional resolution to the Nowhere King’s final defeat and last meeting with the Mysterious Woman who appears throughout the series. And their relationship is hinted at throughout, especially in the season one finale, but since neither of them interacts with the heroes all that much the reveal about their backstory doesn’t feel quite as emotionally satisfying as it’s supposed to. Basically, all of the Nowhere King’s backstory is in the finale–and it’s well done, and the finale is over an hour, so it works. But it would have worked better had that been more teased throughout.

But other than that, this series is really good? Surprisingly good? It’s weird, yeah, incredibly so, because it has a very bubbly cartoon-y style to it. This lends to the humor. The magic in it isn’t always what you’d expect from a fantasy setting. All the main centaurs can shoot tiny versions of themselves out of their hooves. There’s an episode that indicates that since Wammawink usually makes them food with magic, the others don’t have a clue where to find food, or even what food is. And a series like this could easily fall flat if the main characters were boring or unfunny, but I never head that problem? I liked all the main characters, and they’re all entertaining in their own weird ways. Maybe these characters would be grating to some people, but they didn’t for me. These characters consistently made me laugh.

The series is rated for children but I don’t think it’s really made for children. There’s a lot of silly humor, but plenty of the humor isn’t for children. That’s not to say it’s a lot of sex jokes or violence (though there is some suggestive humor, notably Wammawink’s merman magazine), but it’s stuff I don’t know really makes sense for kids to laugh about. The birdtaurs are, for instance, a string of jokes about fandom culture and social media. Comfortable Doug’s whole schtick is about how socially awkward he is. Kids might enjoy them, but it’s not humor that’s aimed at them.

It also sticks out to me that this show only lasts two seasons. It works? Mostly? There was only two seasons worth of story, so they had two seasons, and I know they could have stretched it more if they’d wanted to but it would have felt extraneous. And I appreciate it when a story knows exactly what it’s planning to do as an ending. At the end of season two, the story is over, there’s nowhere else for the story to go. It is a self-contained adventure. I appreciate that. I appreciate that there’s this silly-but-also-serious cartoon that I only need to invest two seasons worth of story for and then moving on, and feeling satisfied when it’s over.

So I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, considering it’s a fun little series on Netflix that seemingly no one I know is talking about (although I had a similar experience with Kipo). I had fun, I felt like it was a series that knew when to end, and I had a lot of laughs along the way.

And now a lot of these songs are stuck in my head so I kind of have to deal with that.

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