4 out of 5

Creator: Ben Bocquelet

It definitely took about 2/3rds of the 1st season for Gumball’s writers to really figure out the tone of the show, but ‘Amazing World’ is so visually inventive and packed with enough silliness that it keeps you just hooked enough to tune in next time… and then once it passes that hill, and the general pitch seems to skew more directly to an older crowd, the madness finds a perfect niche, joining other Cartoon Network strangies like Adventure Time that straddle whatever genres they feel like.  For all of the hodgepodge animation, the initial setting is traditional enough – Gumball (cat) and Darwin (goldfish), member and pet of the Watterson family, get into various hijinks around school and the neighborhood, influenced and spurred on by their fat and lazy bunny rabbit father and their prim and obsessive cat mother… to say nothing of Gumball’s peanut girlfriend, the T-Rex, piece of toast, ghost and balloon schoolmates, their baboon teacher…  The look is forever fresh and stunning, thanks to the mixture of computer-rendered characters, more traditional animated (looking) characters, a live-action chin, some live-action backgrounds, and storyboarding that frequently hops to video game style first person moments, or old school cartoon, or VHS, and etc. and etc.  It would seem like a hook and it is, especially early on when the show steals more from the random Spongebob pages with light moral lessons lingering in the background.  But once there was a following, sure, the butt and poop jokes increase but gone were the lessons and up was the more subversive kid humor, shuffling the random for random sake aside.  This hook of a look then becomes necessity, part of the strange brew of the show.  It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Adventure Time’s warmth, sometimes coming across as more brutal or more plot-centric than may be necessary, but Gumball is still totally unique, and a show to watch.