Chowder

Sara introduced me to a great cartoon on Cartoon Network called Chowder. It is a bit like Sid and Marty Croft re-imagined with a bit of kid-friendly Adult Swim anarchy and maybe a little Food Network thrown in.

I have linked to a highlights YouTube video below, but it fails to show two of my favorite things: the occasional use of claymation, and Schnitzel, a character who expresses himself by varying the tone of a single nonsense word, "Radda." You can see those things, and get introduced to what it is basically about, in this Cartoon Network commercial:



This YouTube video, 5 minutes of highlights, captures quite a bit of what makes it great.



The colors for one thing -- the show has surely one of the best color palates since Courage the Cowardly Dog. And though you cannot see as much of this as I would like in the clip, notice how Chowder's outfit has a pattern on it that stays stationary, like part of of the background, when he moves -- as if his shirt was an empty space moving over a pattern behind it. It is hard to appreciate in clips, but it is kind of mesmerizing on TV.