Welcome back to Multiversity Comics’ Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts reviews. It’s the final season, which is difficult to wrap my head around since the first season came out in January. JANUARY. The show’s not even a year old and it’s over. However, this isn’t a cancelation—the show was planned for thirty episodes from the beginning. No need to panic. Although perhaps some quiet sobbing is in order. . .
Anyway, tears aside. Let’s get back to the review. This week there’s giant crabs, pancakes for dinner, missing humans, and explosive sadness.
“Everything Is Crabs”
Written by Bill Wolkoff
Directed by Bridget Underwood
1. Time jump!
For the past twenty episodes of the show, roughly a day passes with each episode. It’s not exactly a one to one ratio, but it’s pretty close, so by the end of episode twenty, Kipo’s been up on the surface world for roughly twenty days.
This episode begins with a time jump, which gives this season a different feeling right away. Apparently months have passed since the season two finale. The time jump sequence also adds a narration from Kipo, which gives the series a different feeling too. This is the past and Kipo’s telling us about it. It’s not a big deal, and the narration vanishes pretty quickly, but it gives the show a different flavor, something perhaps a little nostalgic—or maybe that’s just me pre-emptively missing the show.
2. Musical recap
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts loves music. It always has, right from the very first episode, and the creators frequently found ways to carve out space for the music to tell the story. So what better way to recap previous seasons than with a musical number?
I loved that Jamack was singing, “Ooooo” while he’s wearing a suit with an O on the back. This sort of playful approach to design is part of what makes this show so great, and it frequently has different departments playing off of each other.
Best of all, this recap shows character development. Look at who Jamack was back in season one versus who he is here. This guy has changed. We’ll talk more about this in future reviews.
3. Home base
This isn’t something that’s immediately apparent in the first episode, but I’m going to address it here anyway. Another big change in the series is that it’s no longer a quest series. Previously, the characters were always going from place to place, meeting new characters and on the run. Structurally, it was questing tale like The Lord of the Rings.
Now they have a home base with the Timber Cats and this has a huge impact on the structure of the show. Previously, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts was always closely focused on its core cast, and it was easy to do so because they were questing in this small group. Now they’re virtually never alone. Kipo has a massive supporting cast now, and so it stands to reason that it changes the dynamics of the show massively.
4. The supporting cast
OK, a bit of backstory and, uh, some spoilers for Animorphs I guess. . . I’ve read all the Animorphs books, and during my animation course I even did up a pitch bible adapting them to an animated series. (It was so much fun.) Anyway, the books always had this core cast of six characters, all kids, trying to save the world. However, as it headed into the finale, this format became unsustainable. Inevitably, the scale of the story grew so much bigger—the world learned of the secret war against the Yeerks, which meant the parents of the main characters learned what their kids had been up to.
What I loved about Animorphs was that it embraced this change and explored its dramatic potential. There’s a temptation with long-running series to maintain the same structural format all the way through, which often leads to endings that feel like they’re contorting themselves to fit into unnatural shapes. (I’m looking at you, LOST.) Animorphs accepted that it could no longer be a “small group of kids against the world” story and became something different, and it was all the better for it.
Continued below
Endings should change things. That’s part of the journey. And that’s what Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is doing here. I mean, Kipo’s got the beginnings of a new home, and she’s surrounded by friends and family. There’s stability here now, and the show goes to great lengths to impress that on its audience, which is really important because this is what’s going to be at stake this season.
5. The shape of a show
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts has changed so much. If you look back at the first season, it was largely episodic, with each episode largely being defined by the new mutes Kipo met. There were ongoing elements, true, but those were mainly related to character development. But in the final season, each episode functions like a chapter now, and the character developments tend to reflect elements of the overall journey of the show.
This is why I’ve been talking about “Everything is Crabs” more in terms of what it’s doing for the series as a whole rather than what it’s doing as an episode. A big part of that is because it’s really hard not to be conscious of it when the structure changes this radically. So much of its final sequence, with the mutes and humans working together to defeat the mega crabs, is an evolution of ideas that have been a part of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts’ DNA since the first episode. It started with Kipo and Mandu working together, and grew to Kipo, Mandu, Wolf, Benson, and Dave, and now it’s grown to an entire community. It’s taken an aspect of Kipo’s character, something that’s core to her self image, and grown it into the defining aspect of the show.
And this is why Scarlemagne is so important, even though all he’s doing is sitting in a glass prison. Kipo’s a positive and expressive character. This means that when Kipo is feeling something like doubt, it’s easy to read it on her face, but she won’t talk about it because she has a drive to stay positive. Scarlemagne gives a voice to Kipo’s doubts, articulating them for the audience. And most importantly, this episode’s conversation with Kipo and Scarlemagne articulates the core theme and conflict of the entire show—How do we live together? This one idea forms the backbone of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and in its final season this is everywhere.
Just saying, this is a really well constructed show.
I know, I know. I sort of talked around the episode this week, but the structural changes here were too big not to talk about. So, what did you think of this episode? Let me know in the comments.
