What Adventure Time Does to Adults

Adventure Time always knew what it was doing. The premise—a boy named Finn and his shape-shifting dog Jake wandering the ruins of a candy-colored post-apocalyptic kingdom—sounds like a pitch from a sugar-drunk eight-year-old, and the show committed to that completely while burying enough emotional honesty underneath to undo you if you weren’t paying attention. I’ve been a fan since the beginning and still can’t explain it without sounding like I’m over-reading a cartoon, which I am, which is fine.

Mike and Katie from TADO built a corner of the Land of Ooo in miniature: a set of vinyl figures for Oooptopia: An Artgebraic Tribute to Adventure Time, which ran at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California through late summer 2012. Their illustration style—that specific flatness, proportions nudged just slightly toward cheerful menace—translates well into three dimensions. Finn rendered in plastic looks exactly like how it feels to watch him: earnest to the point of being almost unbearable.

The character I’d want is BMO—the small sentient game console who lives with Finn and Jake and conducts entire conversations with his own reflection in the mirror. Something about a machine performing personhood, or a person comfortable being mistaken for a machine, keeps being interesting to me in ways I can’t fully account for. Marceline would have been the other obvious choice, but she didn’t make the run.

Gallery Nucleus has been putting on shows like this for years—treating animation fandom as sufficient reason to open a gallery, without condescending to either the fans or the art world. The kind of space that stopped asking whether a cartoon could be art and just got on with it.