Two brothers, teenager Wirt (played by Elijah Wood, an adult) and much younger Greg (Collin Dean, a child), earlier seen in McHale’s short-film-cum-pilot “Tome of the Unknown,” find themselves lost in unfamiliar woods. Set in “a mysterious place called the Unknown where long-forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood,” it has a kind of artisanal quality, reflected not only in its making - you can see the paper texture in art director Nick Cross’ lovely background paintings - but also in its milieu in largely late 19th and early 20th-century Americana, with elements of the Brothers Grimm and the Brothers Fleischer (Max and Dave) also worked in. But there is a rough sameness to CGI cartoons they are limited by their roundedness, their fine-textured apparent “actuality.” Their two-dimensional counterparts - still common in television, for now - are by contrast rooted in millenniums of image-making, modes of representation, graphic symbolism, systems of spatial illusion or spatial compression, from cave paintings to comix.Īnd so from the start, something feels a little radical about “Over the Garden Wall,” which is consciously old-fashioned both in form and substance. I don’t mean to suggest that some fine films haven’t been rendered in 3-D - or that some terrible ones haven’t been drawn by hand. Each segment lasts 11 minutes, the length of a typical cartoon short together, they make a 110-minute self-contained movie. It comes in 10 parts, airing two by two Monday through Friday. The first thing to say about Patrick McHale’s Cartoon Network miniseries “Over the Garden Wall,” after noting that it is beautiful to behold and worth the while of anyone interested in contemporary animation, is that it has been made in a two-dimensional, hand-drawn, hand-painted style virtually extinct in American cartoon features.