Centaurworld

Over the past few days I binged all of the Netflix cartoon Centaurworld. The quickest way to describe this show would be something like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with the adventure stakes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, packaged as an operatic.

It was fine. It falls cleanly short of great. It will have slid off my brain in a week, and in a year i probably won’t remember anything much about it.

(Quick rant! Whenever an adult says anything like this about children’s media, the quick knee-jerk is to stamp one’s feet and holler “IT’S FOR KIDS”, maybe interspersed with some clapping hands emojis. I reject that argument. I think children’s media can be great. For example, quite a lot of Friendship is Magic and Avatar are great. I’ve posted about those shows in the past, here on this blog, in the long-long ago bevore social media and pandemic destroyed the world. I mention them now, by way of comparison, because they stuck with me. They stuck with me because they were really something special, for their time, even though I was 30 when I watched them and not 13. Adults can and should enjoy children’s media, and there are better standards to hold that media to than “did it shut the kids up for a couple hours”. End rant, thanks.)

There was a lot I liked. The cast was entertaining without ever slipping into blatantly obnoxious. (Or, at least, not slipping there for too long at a stretch.) I liked both animation styles, and I think the way they’re blended together is a good worldbuilding trick. I really liked the charming but always juuuust slightly off-putting creature design. There are 18 episodes, and I don’t think any of them classify as filler. Every story they tell either advances the plot or grows the characters or setting in ways that end up being important for the climax.

But the show isn’t great, and I can’t shake the feeling that the reason it isn’t great is because the people who made it didn’t aim for great. They aimed for “safe, and good enough”. This might not have been a bad decision on their part, necessarily. Some shows aim for great and fall short; this is where I think consensus on The Cuphead Show! will probably land. Others, say, Bojack Horseman, feel like they weren’t given the green light to aim for great until they hit some arbitrary marketability goal first.

I don’t know anything about Centaurworld‘s production. Maybe they didn’t have the confidence to aim for something truly great. Maybe they didn’t have the talent. Maybe there’s a whole universe of safe, bankable centaur merch I’m not aware of, and the actual show only had to be just good enough to peddle it.

When I watch something like this, a show I mostly enjoyed but also know is going to fade out pretty quick, I tend to quantify it in terms of what would have made it truly great. I’m going to list those things now, which means SPOILERS FOR CENTAURWORLD FOLLOW.

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Thing #0: Horse and Rider Are Dumb Names

This isn’t a thing which would have improved the quality of the show, it’s just something that bothered me a little bit all the way through. I think it’s really dumb that the horse’s name is Horse, and the rider’s name is Rider. These names are first used by Horse, who has just fallen through the portal into Toontown and discovered she can talk. When she introduces herself as “Horse” and her rider as “Rider” my assumption was, okay, this is a creature who has had no concept of spoken language before now, and “Horse” is just how she used to identify herself in her own mind, back in Crapsack World where she was an ordinary horse.

Eventually Horse and Rider are reunited, and Rider gets to meet all Horse’s new Toontown friends, and I thought for sure we were being set up for a scene where they keep calling her that and she eventually goes, “Uh, actually, my name is _______.” But no, Rider is just consistently called Rider by all the characters, and she doesn’t seem to mind, so I guess that’s her Christian name. And she calls her horse Horse, so I guess that just means she named her horse Horse. Okay.

Maddeningly, Rider later teams up with a second horse character with a cutesy-poo name, confirming that human riders do name their horses and Rider just apparently… didn’t. I woonder what Jaime Lannister would make of all this. Yes, this was worth spending two and a half paragraphs complaining about.

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Thing #1: The Ending is Bad

At the end of the story, in the big climactic battle against the giant monster king, Rider is mortally wounded, and dies, and it’s very sad. Except no, she miraculously survives, despite no medical or magical intervention whatsoever, because of course she does.

While I think adults should enjoy children’s media, I do acknowledge there is a disconnect when it comes to story tropes like this. A hero miraculously surviving a killing blow is something we’ve all seen before, and seen before, and seen before. Sure, sure. Usually in this case I remind myself that the target audience doesn’t have more than a decade of experience with adventure stories yet, because they haven’t been alive for a decade. The scene is boring for me, but there’s a generation of kids out there for whom it will have been their first real nail-biter.

But in this specific adventure I think the story and the messaging would have been much stronger if Rider had died, and then stayed for-real dead. It would have been sad, and it would have broken a lot of hearts, but you know what? I used to be a kid, way back during the Watergate scandal or whatever, when Model Ts roamed the earth. And I remember my first impactful, for-real, no-takes-backsies character death. I will remember it forever. I’ll bet you remember yours, too.

That’s the kind of developmental moment Rider’s death could have been, but Centaurworld chickens out.

Chickentaurs out.

The post-climax finale is a big musical number about how great it is to have friends and how loving your friends is awesome, etc. The messaging here seems to be that Rider loved her new friends so much she just… decided to not die because she didn’t want them to be sad. Instead, it could have been about how Horse loses her oldest and truest friend, and that’s going to hurt forever, but she’s in good hands because of how much her new friends care for her. Rather than moving forward with Rider’s companionship, she holds on to Rider’s memory as a source of strength. The ending can still be a big happy song, bent towards bittersweet. You suffer loss, the losses are meaningful, but you survive.

I really don’t think this ending would have been off-brand. When I say Centaurworld is for kids, I don’t mean it’s for babies. The show dips into some pretty heavy territory, here and there. They don’t shy away from showing Horse’s very real depression, the way a cartoon like My Little Pony would have. They are clear about establishing the violent stakes at hand, where Rider and the other human characters are concerned. Moving forward through loss is an element of almost every character’s backstory.

The foundation is there to handle a bittersweet ending, Centaurworld just didn’t want to. Missed opportunity.

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Thing #2: The Songs Are Bad

18 episodes, most episodes run 20-some minutes, figure two or three songs per episode… and sitting here typing this all up I can’t bring a single one to mind. That’s a big oof.

Centaurworld is a musical, in the sense that zany madcap cartoon characters burst into song at little or no provocation. It’s also a musical in the sense that, in more serious moments, characters will dramatically soliloquize by way of ballad. Sometimes they’ll start one way and end the other, or go back and forth. Wikipedia lists over seventy songs on the soundtrack, and none of them are earworms.

Look, not every musical is going to be Hamilton. But this was supposed to be one of the show’s defining elements and it just kept falling flat, over and over. Mostly the songs just feel like the characters are kind of tunelessly singing their dialogue.

I don’t actually know anything about music, so I can’t offer much more than a thumbs down by way of critique. What I do know is it’s a real shame I don’t have a catchy Durpleton showstopper to hum in the shower.

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Thing #3: It’s Not Dark Enough

The show does get surprisingly dark. Depression, as I said, is a theme. There are some genuinely scary visuals, particularly the Nowhere King, and particularly when paired with the hollow sound of his lullabye. (Oh! I did remember one song, after all! One out of seventy ain’t bad!) The Toontown characters are just a little too cracked to be your standard exaggerated chartoon personalities; they have actual trauma (and sometimes they deal with it very badly).

The bleak, desolate world Horse and Rider originally come from feels like something out of Dark Souls. I wish we spent more time there, but the time we do spend there shows us some pretty messed up stuff. There’s violence, fighting, betrayal, and even some straight-up body horror. Toontown isn’t a silly cartoon world because silly cartoon worlds are fun, it’s a silly cartoon world because we want to play with stark setting contrast. Real monsters are coming and they are really going to kill everyone and it is really important that you goobers stop singing about lollipops for one goddamn second and start taking this seriously.

The show could have gone much, much further with these elements, and 1) still mostly been a show about goobers having fun adventures in Toontown, and 2) not have pushed the envelope into parental advisory territory. There’s lots of perfectly acceptable children’s media that goes way further into darkness, horror, and General Serious Times than Centaurworld does.

By way of specific example: one of the earliest story arcs in the show is how Horse, a battle-hardened warhorse from Crapsack World, lands in Toontown and has to adjust to her new surroundings. It’s silly and weird and none of it makes sense, but she has no choice but to deal with it, and the way in which she deals with it ends up changing her. It’s a well-executed character arc and it’s just one small part of the whole story.

What we don’t get, though, is the opposite viewpoint. I thought for sure we’d see a Season Two storyline where one of the Toontown goobers gets marooned in Crapsack World with Rider, and is forced to acclimate to that reality. There is a small subplot where Rider is attacked on the road and robbed by hungry human children that would have been much improved by a Toontown presence. It would have been an effective moment of realization for Wammawink that these kids had to resort to violence not because she forgot to magic up some pancakes this morning, but because food doesn’t grow here at all anymore.

The dark stuff is so segregated, the show ends up being overwhelmingly a light-hearted friendship adventure story, and the stakes never feel completely real for the main cast. Everyone winces at that scene where Judge Doom puts the shoe into the vat of Dip, but it’s necessary for the climax to pay off later. Centaurworld doesn’t have any Dip.

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That’s it, really.

Cartoons are steadily making it back into my routine media diet. The Cuphead Show! was a visual treat and had fun goofy stories, but many of the gags were tired. Disenchantment is napping in its own butt. Futurama got re-re-un-canceled but none of my dudes seem that excited about it. I don’t know when more Harley Quinn is coming.

So I figured I’d watch this, and then I did, and then I typed about it. Thanks for reading!