The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball Review: Chaos Is Welcome in Hulu's Dazzling Revival

In a world that is becoming increasingly chaotic, perhaps the best balm is… more chaos?

That may not actually be true, but it feels true during every episode of The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball. The gloriously anarchic Hulu series, which is actually a continuation of Cartoon Network's The Amazing World of Gumball, whose six-season run ended in 2019, plunges its imaginatively motley crew of characters into often heightened situations that are dazzling in their freneticness. 

In one 12-minute episode, Gumball (a cat) and his adopted brother and best friend, Darwin (a goldfish), realize that the most boring classmate at their middle school, a sauropod named Molly who drones on ad nauseam, is so dull that she can actually disrupt the space-time continuum. ("Don't get me wrong, I love Molly," Darwin says. "But talking to her is like waiting in line for a waiting room.") In another, Nicole, mother of Gumball, Darwin, and their sister, Anais (a pink rabbit who looks a lot like her father, who is also a pink rabbit), becomes increasingly reliant on a virtual assistant who eventually tries to eliminate Nicole's entire family so that she can finally embrace a life unencumbered by constant chores. Yes, this is technically a children's show. But like all the best children's shows, it is one with a blatantly subversive streak in its madcap personality.

In some of the installments — there are 40 in this new season, the first 20 of which debut July 28 — series creator Ben Bocquelet aims that subversive streak directly at legitimate social issues. "The Teacher," which initially seems to reveal the criminal tendencies in Gumball's and Darwin's teacher, Miss Simian, actually circles back down to Earth to emphasize how difficult and rewarding it is to teach middle schoolers when public school budgets are shrinking. (After handing out toilet paper instead of actual paper to her class, Miss Simian notes, "We also can't afford the whole alphabet anymore, so try to avoid the letters G and T.")

8.5

The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball

at Hulu

Like

• The imaginative animation style
• The hilarious mix of the satirical and the silly

Dislike

• Could be a little too frenetic for very young kids

"The Burger," the season's first episode, finds Gumball and Darwin attempting to eat healthy, organic food and getting thwarted at every turn by a corporate machine that has made it impossible to get affordable, proper nutrition. During a grocery store run, they realize that sports drinks are actually not good for you at all — "Sounds kinda like the names billionaires give their sons," Gumball observes while reading the list of extremely chemical ingredients — and attempt to buy fresh produce instead. "That'll be $3,078," the cashier declares when they attempt to ring up their purchases. Eventually they realize that one insanely wealthy and  powerful CEO is controlling the entire food-to-consumer chain in their town of Elmore. And that CEO happens to be … a talking hamburger. Eat the rich indeed.

Adults will certainly recognize the political and social commentary embedded in these vibrant shorts. The mere fact that there is a goldfish in this series — a fish, a well-known symbol of Christianity — and that Bocquelat named him after Charles Darwin is, all by itself, a work of sly genius. But what kids will mostly appreciate about The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball is its unrelenting silliness. Because some of these episodes are just plain silly. Like the one called "The Butts," in which Principal Brown (a slug coated in brown fur, obviously) forbids Gumball from reading a speech about butts at a school assembly, then reveals that he's suffered from profound shame about his own butt for his entire life. Look, I don't know your 9-year-old. But I feel pretty confident that they will find this hilarious.

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It is correct to describe The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball as an animated series, but it's even more accurate to place it in the mixed media genre. While most of the action is rendered in cartoon form, live-action sequences, puppetry, and other styles occasionally take center stage. These hard turns somehow never feel out of place. In fact, they look right at home in a universe where everything is unpredictable, including the members of the student body at Elmore Junior High, which consists of flowers, ice cream cones, and clouds that wear tube socks. The animators also have a flair for turning their wide-eyed adorable creations into wrinkled, decaying sacks of horror when they're faced with disturbing situations. When Gumball realizes he can't delete a text he accidentally sent to his crush, the cute blue kitty cat — you know, the kind you see in nature all the time — immediately melts into the back car seat of his parents' station wagon and starts floating in a void akin to the Sunken Place from Get Out. Of course such a thing would never happen in actual life. But it conveys exactly how such a moment might feel to a middle schooler. 

That's the gift that the World of Gumball gives us: an escape to a realm of fun bedlam, at a time when the bedlam of the real world is anything but.

Premieres: Monday, July 28 on Hulu
Who's in it: Alkaio Thiele, Hero Hunter, Kinza Syed Khan, Teresa Gallagher, Dan Russell
Who's behind it: Ben Bocquelet (creator)
For fans of: Silliness, subversive comedy, inventive animation
How many episodes we watched: 9