If you’re a fan of animation (and adventure), I highly recommend Cartoon Network’s new show The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack! The show was created by Mark “Thurop” Van Orman (read a good interview here) and in my opinion, it’s the best thing to come along since that whacky little sponge we all know and love.

Flapjack (voiced hilariously by Van Orman) is a young boy who lives in, and apparently is raised by, a whale named Bubbie. Their good friend Captain K’nuckles (voiced by the great Brian Doyle-Murray) has cast a spell over the young boy with his tales of adventure on the high-seas. Flapjack and K’nuckles hope to eventually find the mythological “Candied Island,” but spend most of their time in Stormalong Harbor getting into trouble.

Van Orman himself sums up the tone of the show pretty succinctly: “If a cartoon can make me uncomfortable, then I’ll be tuning in again. If it can make me uncomfortable while I’m laughing my ass off then I’ll never miss it.”

It’s the visual style of the show that really caught my attention. The characters live in this aged, grimy, highly-textured world that feels like old pictures from the 1800s that have been painted.

Owing a lot to Ren and Stimpy, the show uses very contrasting styles for effect, often cutting quickly to a frame that is much more detailed than the rest of the show or mixing in some live action. In fact, the show open is done in a completely different style than the show itself - it’s made to look like claymation.

Although it was my four year old who turned me on to this show, I wouldn’t recommend it for a child his age. There are some really dark aspects about it. Issues of severe poverty, plague, alcoholism and just down-right freaky hallucinations are probably a bit too much for young kids. But the kids today, what can you do?

P.S. The fan site is better than most, definitely worth checking out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.