Come Along With Me: Adventure Time – “Beyond the Grotto” and “Lady Rainicorn of the Crystal Dimension”

Beyond the Grotto | Written & Storyboarded by Seo Kim and Somvilay Xayaphone | First Aired: April 9, 2016 | Reviewed by: Prestidigititis

So…what is a lard?

A lard is like…this animal. A few different animals, in fact; unique to Ooo and its environs. A nice elements of a show like AT (where all the creatives are welcome to add their own spin to the worldbuilding and borrow heavily from one another over the course of many years) is you get things like Lards: a creature-type that is just around, in different forms, inhabiting different biomes. They’re prevalent and unremarkable  to the inhabitants of Ooo. But they’re there, and they have entered our main characters’ lives in small ways (and will again).

You got your Space Lards, your Grass Lards, your Angler Lards, your Greed Lards, and your Sea Lards. In the case of that last one, “your” means “Finn’s.” Because way back during “Princess Day,” he won himself a sea lard, and it looks like he’s still pretty keen on it. This one’s been sharing Finn’s bed like a big ol’ lazy stuffed animal. With a bulbous head. That can roll on its own.

The fact that this sea lard draws Finn and Jake into a big adventure speaks to the kind of person Finn is. He cares about everyone, and when he sees a need to be heroic, he dives in, hat-first (tidy-whities last).Worm Shelby offers info about the need for osmoregulation among stenohaline fish, and Finn doesn’t need to hear anything more. He just gotta save that lard. And Jake gotta help his bro. In this way, a simple bit of Ooo fauna draws our boys into one of the more surreal vision quests in the series’ history.

Beneath the little pond in front of the tree fort, there’s an area where the water opens into a grotto, where the cute water nymphs live. They’re doing their nymphy thing, singing about frogs and squishing them into green hot dogs. Soon the boys see their lard caught in a whirlpool, and the go after it heroically, barely hearing the warnings the water nymphs tell them about “touching the purple stuff.” The lard and our heroes are pulled down down down, into…

Another place. A strange inverted version of the world they inhabit, complete with entirely new art and movement. While they still have most of their wits about them, Jake calls it a “portal to the past,” but it’s more than just an earlier time period. There’s more than just regression, there’s reduction. We see what appears to be prehistoric versions of Finn and Jake approaching the pond, lapping up some water as a familiarly Bubblish voice welcomes them with a giggle. A butterflyrainicorn alights on Jake’s nose to give him a kiss. Marceline has been drawn down to a lovely singing siren-flower who is helpful enough to put our boys back on their task when her voice enchants them. The Ice King is now a wee princess with a very simple design; his delusional existence now externalized into the form of Purple:  both a little Guntherlike companion and a kind of free-floating spore material that dampers the comprehensive abilities of anything it touches. In this way, Finn and Jake are reduced as well, their Purple-inflicted ego death reducing them to Boy and Dog. They venture onward.

By this point, viewers are accustomed to different animators and art styles popping up in Adventure Time, but it’s still striking to see such a big visual shift in the middle of what was an otherwise ordinary episode. The look and feel of this underworld is provided by Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera, of the independent animation studio Smallbü. Smallbü has done a lot of stuff you may have seen but not realized are theirs, within the Adventure Time world and beyond. Their style befits this episode well. Everything feels loose and fluid; non-corporeal. Like a character’s outline could fail at any moment, and their entire body slowly escape into the world around it. Indeed, when the lads are affected by the memory-sapping Purple, the characters are reduced to near-monochrome, and the figures color-shift with a light red echo of their silhouettes following them as they move. It’s not entirely disorienting, but it’s very noticeably…wrong.

And yet, this land beyond the grotto doesn’t feel foreign, or all that threatening. Its reductive version of the more familiar places and people of Ooo are reassuring and correct to Finn and Jake, the way places in a dream are familiar, but not quite correct. It becomes a means for Finn and Jake to rediscover their world, since so much of what usually grounds them has become uncertain, and their understanding of themselves becomes unmoored. To me it seems like they’re falling back into a more innocent frame of reference, the way a very small child might feel when it first encounters the world. Things seem to fit, but they don’t quite make sense. This oddness isn’t threatening, though. In fact, it’s quite alluring to the boys. Jake called it a portal to the past, but that’s not quite right. It’s more a reduction of the understanding you get as you grow. Not just for the observer, but the observed as well. 

The reductive version of Tree Trunks appears, beseeching Boy and Dog to help her find her rolling pin. Of course that pin is actually the lard, unhappily conscripted into baking utensility. Lardpin escapes; Dog and Boy rush after it to help, and soon encounter a poetic Bee-MO offering a metaphor in verse about seeking egress…which goes soaring over our heroes’ heads. Eventually they find themselves back at the pond, which is pink and pretty, and even less familiar to our lads now that they’ve been Deep Purpled. The pond’s sweet giggle greeting, and offer to dive into its whirlpooling face, don’t convince Boy to push on. It falls to the lard itself–once the pursued in need of rescue, now the means of Boy and Dog emerging from their reverie–to plunge them back to the broader world. The rabbit hole pulls back from us.

In the end, Finn and Jake are left with a grand story to share with BMO (and be overheard by Ice King). They don’t seem to reflect on it in the moment, but it does allow Finn to find it in himself to appreciate the sea lard a bit more. Does he recall that the lard helped him back to the real world? Impossible to say. Has this vision quest change our boys’ perspective on their lives? Again, uncertain. We don’t even know how fully they understand or remember what they went through. Jake remembers the main players and what felt familiar about them, but I get the sense that he was relating it like one relates a dream upon waking. We know how dreams fade, while their deep impressions remain. My sense is this is how things will stay with Finn and Jake: an experience fading, but still having left an imprint. It was nice that we got to go along.

Observations:

–This episode practically begs to be seen as extended and precise metaphors for how the characters were recontextualized. Bubblegum as a passive, friendly pond. Ice King as a female Princess. BeeMO the poet. Were these implicit statements the creators made about the nature of these characters, or how they relate to Finn and Jake? I’m more inclined to see it more as a whole, and let the representations be less of a specific critique and more of a journey of vibes.

–As always, any episode that gives us a Marceline song automatically becomes a top-tier episode.

–This grotto’d version of Mr. Pig is kind of a hunk, huh?

–Smallbü is one of my favorite independent animation studios, and I cannot recommend their work more highly. I recommend y’all look into Later Alligator (a fun, hilarious, chill videogame), and Baman Piderman (one of my all-time favorite surreal animation webseries). They were also responsible for the award-winning animation in the “Winter King” episode of Fionna and Cake, as well as the opening credit sequence for F&C’s second season. We’ll see their stuff again in season nine.

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Who expected the Rainicorn-Dog Wars to ever come back?

Way back in season 2, we have a typical-for-its-era hijinksy episode where Jake is nervous to meet Lady Rainicorn’s parents, since he’s a dog and they fought in the Rainicorn-Dog wars. So naturally, Jake pretends to be a rainicorn himself, using his stretchy powers, and Finn very nearly gets eaten because I guess rainicorns eat humans? But then the day is saved when Jake comes clean, Lady’s parents are cool because a dog saved them during the war so actually they love dogs (even though the war was against dogs in the first place?) and they all have a nice picnic lunch of soy people, so Finn doesn’t have to get eaten. Finn himself eats some, and smiles at the taste, which is said to taste almost identical to real humans.

I bring that all up because, wow early Adventure Time could get bonkers, huh? Rainicorns eating humans, a nearly extinct species, giving the implication that rainicorns hunted them into extinction? I mentioned in the parenthetical how Lady’s parents loving dogs because a dog saved her dad during the war doesn’t really make sense, but also it wasn’t really supposed to. Early AT ran on subversion and playing with formula. A farce born from nervousness at meeting your girlfriend’s parents is a classic stock plot, so to spice it up they add an intentionally kinda dumb version of the obligatory twist that makes everything okay, and add in some semi-cannibalism at the end for fun. You’re not supposed to take it seriously, or deconstruct it, or really think about it for even 5 minutes after the episode ends.

Which makes it a compellingly strange topic to revisit, 6 seasons later. And one thing I appreciate about Lady Rainicorn of the Crystal Dimension is how it doesn’t really try to make it make sense. Like, why were Lee and Lady anti-dog activists in their past? Some of their activities seem to be hippie-esque “freak out the squares” pranks more than political actions, and Lady seemed specifically uncomfortable with Lee’s more overtly terroristic actions. But, what appealed to her about any of it? Lee mentions to some dogs that they might not be used to seeing a rainicorn stand up for themself, which certainly implies that dogs won the war and have been the ruling class of the Crystal Dimension ever since. But like, are they really? We honestly only have Lee’s word for that, and I’m not entirely sure I trust that guy!

Or like, Lee’s motivation for stealing the Crystal Mergence of Destruction is to use as a weapon against dogs, so then why are dogs working with him in the present? That would imply that Lee’s only in it for himself, no ideological commitments, but Lady didn’t seem fully sold on the anti-Dog angle either, so then who was that even for? Though, that part’s maybe truer to life than you’d hope; you have to watch out for people in radical spaces who only really seem animated by the part where they get to break shit, or attack people, and who never have anything to say or contribute related to the cause outside of violence. Like, I’m not here to tell people “violence never solves anything, only non-violent resistance is valid”1Also, I’m not fucking stupid, I’m not gonna fedpost in an Adventure Time review of all places or anything like that, but you pay attention long enough and you recognize the type.

But, we don’t know for sure that Lee doesn’t have a point either! Watching this episode, I’m struck by the detail of Lady’s parents’ translator boxes, which they use even in the Crystal Dimension, where seemingly everyone can at least understand both English and Korean. Originally, these were a comedic plot device in a season 1 episode; Lady has one, which would let her be understood by Finn, but it makes her voice sound like an old man, which turns Jake off.2Also the plot of the episode is about Lady and Finn hanging out and making Jake jealous, it’s not 11 minutes about how Jake’s too basic to handle a bad bitch with a clocky voice But, these too pick up new context in our season 8 revisit. It would appear Korean is the native language of rainicorns, while English is a dog language, and Lady’s parents using translators even when talking to Lady and Lee sure reads as cultural assimilation, doesn’t it. Are Lady’s parents grateful towards dogs for sparing them during the war, or are they grateful for the minor luxury and privilege afforded them as traitors to their own people? We see scummy scam artist Toronto in the flashback, palling around with dogs; maybe what Lady saw in Lee was someone finally willing to do something about the obvious oppression and injustice rainicorns had to live under as a result of losing the war.

And maybe what TV saw in Lee was a connection to his own heritage, one he can’t explore in his home dimension, where Lady and his siblings are the only rainicorns around. It’s clear that NEET TV isn’t thriving back in Ooo. Maybe he’s just fundamentally a layabout and a leech,3He does seem to already be taking his grandparents’ support for granted but maybe connecting with his mom’s side of the family will do him some good. Or who knows, maybe he’s just developed a taste for soy people and doesn’t wanna offend his uncle.

Stray Observations:

• TV’s little “I have a new best friend!~” “Named Lee” jingle is precious, and makes Lee’s betrayal hurt all the more.
• This is the only episode where Lady’s Korean gets translated, which on the one hand feels like a necessity, given how much of the episode involves either her or Lee speaking Korean. But on the other hand, it would have been a pretty bold move to stick to the show’s normal standard, and I’m mildly disappointed in Adventure Time for not simply taking that swing.