Wander over Yonder was written in August 2013 by Craig McCracken. The series is about Wander, a small orange-fured humamnoid alien and Sylvia, his blue horselike alien friend as they travel the Yonder Galaxy helping people and sometimes stopping threats to the galaxy; most often Lord Hater, a magical skeleton supervillain overlord, or Lord Dominator a lava (and later ice) wielding galactic destroyer.
3 Reasons I love it:
1: If Cardcaptor Sakura is my wholesome series of the 90s and Pretty Cure is my wholesome of the 00s, then Wander over Yonder is definitely my wholesome series of the 10s. The series has a positive optimistic energy that feeds into everything about the series from the bouncy colorful animation, to the main character's seemingly endless good will and generous spirit towards others, to the series overall themes about optimism in the face of despair and the utility and value of compassion to others. It's generally just pleasent to watch.
2: Despite the fact that the series defacto is really fast-paced and I would almost describe as a "loud" series, a series of contant actions and energy and things happening, the series actually takes some time every now and again to do something slower and quieter and more completaive and instead of feeling cheesy, these come across in contrast to everything as the most memorable and meaningful moments of the series; moments like the death of Beep Boop, Sylvia helping the young scared Wander, and my favorite moment of the series.
3: WOY has an infectious creative energy to it. The series takes place in another galaxy where many of the planets and peoples are strange and have odd forms and rules. This gives the series nearly infinite room to play around with what they want to do and the series really takes advantage of it, often taking on bizarre concepts for an episode just for the fun of it such as an episode spent on parodying other cartoons with Lord Hater demanding his watchdogs make propoganda about him, a species of aliens that regularly has to migrate from planet to planet due to a cosmic dog mistaking their planets for balls to play with, or an episode dealing with the attachment issues of a living planet. The series is full of creative ideas and an energy of discovery with each episode. Despite my tendency to prefer serialization, this is one of the series I think probably works better in an episodic format just so that it can have complete free reign to do what it wants each ep.
3 Flaws:
1: I personally think the series is not operating as well as it can until the second season when Lord Dominator shows up. WOY is a series that thrives on having as much possibility as it can, and the inclusion of a more serious villain allowed for more possibilities in the storytelling. While Hater can be threatening and he does have the more serious Commander Peepers by his side, Wander can stop him so consistently that it doesn't have the proper level of menance. Plus the relations of Wander and Dominator or Hater and Dominator also add good dynamics to the series.
2: Sometimes the level of threat in the series is kind of ambigious. I'm not saying the series needs to say "Lord Dominator comitted genocide" or anything, that would definitely hurt the series by going way against it's general tone and I think the series went as dark as it could without breaking tone with the Death of Beep Boop. That said because the series is primarily a light-hearted comedy, it makes it kind of hard to tell at times in season 2 how big a threat Dominator is until the very end where they say in clear terms "this is the last stand, this is important." Other times it's unclear how actually serious we're supposed to take the threat. This is also true of the other supervillains in the series, where sometimes they're goofs that essentially play off one joke each and literally try to conquer the galaxy for a leaderboard, and other times they're meant to be taken as serious threats.
3: One of the downsides of WOY's episodic nature is that many times a concept that is really cool will be introduced, lore you want to see in later episodes, and then it never returns save as a cameo. I was kind of hoping that the grand finale would be everyone in the galaxy Wander has helped comes back and teams up to stop Dominator, which kind of happens but I thought could have been bigger. I would have liked Major Threat to telekinetically hold her ship, Dr Screwball Jones to cause her side a laughing attack, Buster to throw planets like balls in Fetch at her etc. I also would have liked to learn more about the Star Nomads, which sadly does not really show up.
My Favorite Part:
My favorite part is the episode titled "The Flower", an episode that I think beautifully encaptures the idea that while we suffer sometimes for seemingly no reason in this life, our efforts make a better world we will never see for those that come after us, that a small flower's life of suffering causes the entire galaxy to bloom again from oblivion.
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