Adventure Time might be one of the most landmark animated series in the history of cartoons. It was a shifting moment in culture along with Regular Show that marked a whole new period in Cartoon Network and, I’d say, in American cartoon show aesthetics from what came before. Adventure Time hit at a point with kids looking for something new and expanding their imaginations, the first Generation Z things brand new to the world, I’d say. Pendelton Ward’s show about Finn the Human and Jake the Dog in the world of Ooo having adventures seemed to mature along with the fanbase, even if it was a more mixed fanbase than people might’ve thought at first. Finn basically aged with his audience; he was basically a sixth grader in the beginning, and by the end, he’d have gone through so much as he entered his young adulthood. Between the surreal visuals, at times existential stories, wonderful songs, and memorable characters, there was one episode that stood out – Fionna and Cake. Now, this episode with a gender-bent version of the leads with Finn, now a 16-year-old girl named Fionna, and her pet cat Cake, basically was just like any old episode of the show except all the males were now females and females now males. By the end, you find out this was just in the imagination of the character, the Ice King. They were popular, so they did another, but eventually, Adventure Time ended, and while there have been some specials, you kind of reserved yourself that our times in Ooo were done – until it wasn’t.
Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake is a show that’s for those same ten-year-old kids who were watching in 2010 but are now in their early 20s. Fionna Campbell (Madeleine Martin) is a pretty aimless young woman living on her own in the city with her regular cat, Cake (Roz Ryan). She doesn’t like her job, is dating an F boy of a DJ guy, and enjoys spending time with her friends, yet she dreams of more. She dreams of ADVENTURE. This start of the series was pretty jarring because they really took a show that, using book terms, started in a Middle-Grade space, moved into the Young Adult space when it ended, and returned again to the New Adult world. This show, being on Max, is for adults. It’s not vulgar, but it’s not sitting there expecting this to be something a fifth-grader is watching, either. Fionna and the other characters have real problems and issues to work out. Besides our titular duo, the other main character is Simon Petrikov (Tom Kenny), the former Ice King (it’s too long and sad to explain the long tale of the Ice King), and our guy is also going through it. No longer a completely out-of-wack old wizard who has no connection to reality, he’s now a man out of time lovesick over his lost fiancée, Betty. His attempt at finding brings the worlds of Fionna and Cake’s more normal, like our world, into the one of Ooo, and that ends up leading the three of them on a search through the multiverse to get the two back home to their world and maybe give Simon some purpose.
Adam Muto, who worked on the original series, really works with his team to craft something that feels completely different with so many characters that you’re familiar with. The 30-minute-long episodes allow them to let stories breathe and have more space to delve into deeper motivations of the characters than the old show did, where they had to do these things over many episodes over the years. This show has episodes that really made me think and do well showing how a world full of adventure is different as an adult than a child or teenager. They were able to make an “adulting is very hard” work in a fantasy show and something that will also set things apart in cartoons, I feel, just like its earlier series did.
Score: B+
RIOTUS 