November 4, 2025

You don't need no ticket, boys

On Punch Cat Studios' Over the Garden Wall Reanimated and the value inherent in passion.

by Rollin Bishop

Every fall, as is tradition, I watch Over the Garden Wall. The spooky Cartoon Network animated miniseries created by Patrick McHale remains as delightful now as it was upon release over a decade ago, and my annual pilgrimage alongside Wirt and Greg and Beatrice typically takes place somewhere between October 1 and November 15 — Thanksgiving feels too late, and I often get antsy about wrapping up a couple weeks before then.

All of which means I've been looking for an excuse to cover Over the Garden Wall here at re:frame for a month and change, but what is there to say at this point that hasn't already been said before or better? It's great; it's still great. It'll continue being great. I've spent weeks idly trying to find some kind of new insight, looking underneath animated rocks to see what scurries below. But sometimes your desire doesn't actually align with the right spark.

So, when Punch Cat Studios released Over the Garden Wall Reanimated: Harvest Melodies yesterday, it felt a bit kismet.

Punch Cat Studios, if you're not already familiar, is functionally a "non profit fan created project" umbrella for reanimated projects from hundreds of volunteer artists and animators spearheaded by animation YouTuber Saberspark and animator Rishicoyote. Punch Cat Studios previously released a reanimated Bluey episode back in June 2024, but Saberspark specifically has dabbled in this sort of collaboration years earlier.

The reanimated Over the Garden Wall collab has been in the work for over a year and includes multiple musical sequences —  "Patient Is the Night," "Potatoes and Molasses," "The Beast Is Out There," "Over the Garden Wall," and "Into the Unknown" — with shots from different volunteer animators in all manner of mediums: 2D, 3D, physical, and so on. There's a little bit of everything here across all different levels of experience, which makes sense given the initial response to calls for animators in late 2024 was so overwhelming that the project almost immediately expanded.

It's always difficult to critique these kinds of reanimated projects in part because regardless of how subjectively or objectively they are viewed, their creation alone is a success. If the point is to celebrate a previous animation, to bring together a group of people in order to publish and share a fan-created project years later, Punch Cat Studios has done that and thoroughly succeeded.

And that passion is so very important. Everyone involved, regardless of their respective shot, should feel proud to have made… this. You have made something, which not everyone can say they have done, and it exists. That's not meant to diminish the talent involved, because there are some truly impressive sequences that I won't spoil here. But it does, in some ways, feel directly parallel to what we're doing here: re:frame is a passion project, about something we're passionate about, because we want to do it.

Or, in other words, sometimes it's enough just to venture into the unknown.

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/out of frame

🤖 Rollin: I've been watching The Big O for the first time, if you can believe it, and let me confirm: 25 years later is an absolutely wild way to experience this one. A dash of Batman with a splash of giant robot, The Big O is singular in a way few projects ever are.

🗼 Kambole: I'm currently in Tokyo for the film festival, which is wrapping up tomorrow. On the animated side of things I saw The Obsessed, a feature from a Shin-Ei vet of 30 years, but also his first feature film as director outside of the Crayon Shin-chan films. It's pretty good! Some reservations about writing around the main character, but the art style is strikingly different from the average anime.

👹 Toussaint: I've managed to squirrel away a few hours in between household chores and work stuff this week to play a bit of Silly Polly Beast, a new supernatural horror-shooter about a young orphan who descends into a psychedelic underworld, and I'm having a blast so far. The gunplay is fast-paced and the character designs, environments, and overall aesthetic feels strongly reminiscent of 2016's Persona 5 by way of 2024's Children of the Sun.