Owl House S1E1: “A Lying Witch and a Warden”

Another modern American toon, also ordered by @Vinegrape. It's another Disney production, which I guess at this point is just another way of saying "it's a piece of entertainment media created in or near the United States." Disney needs the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt's boot up its ass something fierce. Anyway, Owl House premiered just this last January, and the most recent episode came out earlier this month, so we're on the bleeding edge of family-friendly animation here. Also, it apparently has gay people in it. Begin!


Open on a subterranean battle between a dragon and a wizard lady. The dragon taunts and threatens her in a high pitched voice that I'm pretty sure I recognize from somewhere, I'll have to check the VA credits. The woman introduces herself as Princess Azura, the warrior of peace (erm...the irony of that title has to be intentional, right?) and then blows the dragon to hell with a bunch of fireballs.

The dragon screams in disbelief that his opponent figured out that being killed was his only weakness (lol). Then we cut away to a girl in a modern school setting finishing the fantasy story she was just telling to her principle and mother. In the former's office.

Apparently, she gave an oral book report on the fantasy novel she just finished reading. Which wouldn't be such an issue, had her visual aids not included a live snake that she brought to school.

So, yeah. That's why she and her mother are both in this room. Well, moreso because of the multiple "backup snakes" that she brought in case this one escaped, most of which escaped themselves and began terrorizing the school.

So, is this show basically Calvin & Hobbes Redux? This is exactly the sort of thing Calvin would do, and exactly the sort of follow up scene it would receive. The parallels aren't lessened when it's revealed that she also brought a bunch of fireworks to class, which she had planned to detonate for the "act three closer."

Her mother reminds her that this isn't the first, second, or third time that she's been sent to the principle's office for her poorly conceived and oftentimes dangerous special effects hobby. We see a montage of her trying out for a school performance of Romeo and Juliet and stuffing her shirt full of raw sausages to pull out during the suicide scene (kid...that's not how knives work), stuffing the model griffon she made in arts and crafts with live spiders for anatomical accuracy (kid...if griffons were real, that's not how they would work), and turning her eyelids inside out as part of her proposed cheerleading routine (kid...). She admonishes her that she really needs to learn to separate fantasy from reality.

I don't think that that's the girl's actual problem, though. She seems to know what's real and what isn't. She just doesn't seem to grasp propriety or occupational safety. Eh, close enough I guess. Ish.

Anyway, her mom tells her that if she causes one more incident before the end of the schoolyear, she's going to send her to a normal conversion therapy camp.

It's um. A camp to send weird kids to, to teach them to be normal.

Allegedly, this show is open about having queer characters at some point. I kind of hope that this bit here isn't trying to be a metaphor for the same thing, considering that the kid's behavior that we've been shown is a whole lot more actually problematic than being gay. So yeah, if this was meant as a metaphor for that, it's kind of an uncomfortable metaphor. Maybe I'm just jumping at shadows.

Anyway, she promises to stop causing trouble, and an instant later loses her grip on the snake, which promptly attacks the principle. Holy fuck these snakes are aggressive, that's not normal behavior for them. Anyway, cut to her mom dropping her off at the bus stop for normal-away camp, where she will learn to "balance checkbooks and appreciate public radio." The girl protests that she doesn't like that stuff, and would rather be making AMV's and reading fantasy novels with impenetrably complicated backstories. Her mom counters that that's holding her back and stunting her social and academic life, and that this camp will do her a world of good.

...

Okay, yeah, whatever this IS supposed to be an allegory for - minority sexualities, or just more general not fitting in - it's not a good one. Because, again. The issue isn't just that she doesn't behave the way society expects her to. It's also that at least some of her behavior is actually dangerous to herself and others.

Maybe the show actually if going to acknowledge this later, but for now it seems to be taking the girl's side and making the adults react unreasonably. The harmless traits that this scene is focusing on and passing off as the object of contention (fantasy-mania, not having real friends, etc) are NOT the ones that have been getting her in trouble.

...

She throws her book about Azura, Warrior of Peace, in the dumpster as a show of contrition or whatever. Her mom kisses her goodbye, and then heads off to work. As soon as she's gone, the girl tries to fish her book out of the dumpster again, but it's gone.

Across the street, an owl is lugging away a burlap sack with a bunch of random objects in it. Including her book. It's heading toward an abandoned house off at the edge of the woods near her house.

I'd infer that this is a magical, sentient owl, but after those snakes I wouldn't be that surprised if this was normal owl behavior in this world.

The girl hesitates for a moment before chasing the owl into the creepy abandoned house. The door closes behind her, and there's a flash of brilliant light that engulfs the house. The house must have a truck engine hooked up to it, because it just sent her and the owl to a magical world. The part of the magical world that it sent her to is some kind of warehouse full of random stolen junk. Outside of it, in a sunlit carnival-type place, some pale-skinned witch lady deactivates the owl and installs it back on the head of her staff, and then starts rifling through the dumpster-diving sack it brought back.

She disregards an expensive looking smart phone, some jewelry (which I imagine is probably fake, if her owl-drone got this shit by going through dumpsters...), and a trophy of some kind, and takes an interest in some springy googly eyes that she proclaims will make her rich. She notes that the girl's book might make good kindling, and starts using it to light a bigger fire than her current candle setup.

Okay, so the titular "lying witch" of this episode is some kind of interdimensional...thief? Salvager? She sends her drone to grab random curiosities from our world, which are apparently considered valuable in hers. If mundane trinkets from Earth are rare and expensive here, then that means that the ability to open those portals must be a very rare one.

Anyway, the kid grabs her book before the witch can burn it and tries to run back through the portal, but the witch turns off the truck engine and the portal vanishes. Instead, the girl finds her way out under the far side of the witch's storeroom-tent and sees the lay of the land.

A very Adventure Time looking land.

Also, she's approached by a tiny, beautiful fairy who wants to eat her skin, and who deforms its face into a mass of lamprey teeth to peel it off with. Fortunately, the fairy is tiny and thus easily repelled.

The witch lady catches up to her and demands the book back, but falters when the girl's reaction is one of panic and fear. I don't think she noticed that the kid came through the portal in the first place? Or she's just really ignorant about how humans think and act, despite selling our artifacts. Also, she...oh, okay, yeah, she doesn't realize that the kid followed her from the other side yet, because she starts offering to sell her some other human stuff and pitches them as foreign curiosities.

She doesn't seem to understand what anything actually is or does though. When the kid puts some batteries from a bowl labeled "human candy" and installs them into a portable TV that the witch thought was an overdesigned mirror, it gets the attention of every demon and fairy on the fairgrounds.

Naturally, this endears her considerably to the witch lady. As she makes sales (and acknowledges that the kid actually is human, albeit very condescendingly), the two exchange names. The girl is Luce. Luze? Luse? It's short for a long Spanish name that I've never heard before and couldn't quite catch. I'll go with Luce for now. The witch introduces herself in turn as Ida the Owl Lady, most powerful witch on the Boiling Isles. Also, she pulls off her scarf to reveal her pointy ears, so I guess she's an elf or something as well as an owl witch.

Before introductions (or sales) can go any further, a hulking, armored soldier wearing what looks like a plague doctor's mask pushes through the crowd and identifies Ida as a wanted criminal who he is now placing under arrest. He also seizes Luce, for the crime of sort of being in the same place as Ida I guess. Ida, for all that she came across unsympathetically up until now, doesn't use the opportunity to flee while the soldier is grabbing Luce, but instead uses it to knock him flat with her owl staff. She magically packs up all her stuff, grabs Luce herself (who she explains is "much more valuable to me alive than dead," which Luce doesn't find any more comforting than it sounds), and flies the two of them away on her multipurpose owl staff.

That detachable owl-drone shifts into a more batlike appearance when its in flying broomstick mode. Um, sure I guess.

As they fly over a weird wasteland environment, Ida explains that the Boiling Islands are a parallel universe that's influenced our mythology and folklore over the millennia. As they fly, they pass a griffon, and Luce is delighted to learn that they do, in fact, exhale clouds of living spiders. Okay, fine, you win this round Luce, but I remain firmly committed to my positions on knives and cheerleading. Also, apparently giraffes are an invasive species from the Boiling Isles, because sure why not. Also also, Ida can detach and reattach her limbs at will, which freaks Luce out despite being the kind of trick she always seems like she wishes she could pull.

Luce asks if Ida can send her home, since this magical world is a little more WTF than the kind she always dreamed of finding and she doesn't like it. Ida says yes, but only in exchange for something. Okay then. They land near a big, whimsical looking mansion. This is the Owl House, Ida's refuge from modern life, cops, and ex-boyfriends. She claims that the house's magical defenses are sufficient to deter the law, but I kinda suspect she may be leaning on jurisdictional limitations there as well. Also, she has to fight the doorknob to get them inside. It's a nice place once they're in, though.

Ida doesn't live here alone though. A deep, booming voice claiming to be a demon king echoes out from another room, demanding to know who this new intruder is. The entity rounds the corner into the living room, and reveals itself to be a...Cubone? Either a furry Cubone, or a cat or small dog cosplaying as one.

Also, now that it's not doing the amplified echoing voice, is that Alex Hirsch? Let me check the VA credits...yup, it's Bill Cipher alright! I wonder if Hirsch played any role in the writing of this show as well, it certainly has some Gravity Falls-ish details (albeit still taking more obviously after Adventure Time).

Ida explains that King was once a mighty demon king, but then his crown of power was stolen, reducing him to this tiny, nearly helpless creature that Luce sees before her. Wait, he was a demon king, and his name was also King? Fuckit, I'm just calling him Bradley. Bradley's crown is currently in the possession of a warlord who calls himself Warden...

...

...Wrath.

That. I didn't even plan that. Talk about irony. Okay, the little fuzzy thing is going to be named...um...Il. Yeah, Il it is.

Ida explains that Il's crown is being kept in a magical vault that no native of this world can penetrate, but that a human should be able to. Hmm. Now I'm getting Undertale-ish vibes, at least from this one subplot. Anyway, if Luce helps them steal back the crown, Ida says she'll reopen the portal and let her return to Earth. Which is basically entrapment, since she's the reason Luce is stuck here in the first place, but Ida's been pretty well established as a morally gray if not black character at this point so that's not such a surprise.

Also, the title of the episode is "a LYING witch and a waden." So she might well not even be planning to hold up her end of the bargain.

Ida brings Luce and Il to the outer perimeter of the "conformitorium," the stronghold of Warden Wrath. It's the same place where that plague doctor cop was trying to bring them to before, so I guess Wrath is the law around these parts. It's also a prison for entities who Wrath thinks disturb the social order of his territory. Oh my, the sheer subtlety!

Anyway, the vault with the crown is up in the central tower, so getting to it will take some doing.

Ida says she'll make a diversionary attack while sending them up to a tower window. Hopefully, there should be few enough guards left in the tower for them to slip past and let Luce penetrate the vault.

Also, there are wanted posters for Ida hanging up around the outer walls. She's definitely been making a nuisance of herself.

Luce is hoping that this might be an opportunity to put her special effects skills into practice and disguise herself as something. Ida and Il aren't really sure how to go about this, so Luce just consoles herself by putting on her cat-ear hoodie and making cat noises. Okay sure works for them. Ida levitates them up to the tower window, and then takes off herself on her owl-bat-staff to attack elsewhere. Luce and Il climb into the tower window, and find themselves in the Conformitorium's main prison area. Included among the prisoners are a girl who looks like she might be the same species as Ida (different skin tone, but same ears and fangs) who's been arrested for the crime of writing slashfic about food items, a multi-eyed ogre who's in for eating and regenerating his own eyeballs, and a ball-shaped creature with a giant nose who believes in too many conspiracy theories.

The slashfic elf girl's voice is another super familiar one, but I can't quite place it. According to wiki...Oh, huh, it's Azula from "Avatar." And also Mandy, from "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy." Well, that explains it.

Thundering footsteps approach, which the prisoners recognize as those of Warden Wrath himself. I guess Ida's distraction was less successful than hoped. Luce and Il hide in an empty cell and try to act like the other prisoners, which is probably the best option they've got. The Warden enters. Big guy. Very big guy. Plague doctor mask similar to the ones his soldiers wear, but fancier uniform otherwise. He demands to know what all this loud conversation is over, and then notices the wanted poster for Ida that Luce dropped as she was hiding in her cell. Fortunately, he doesn't find its presence here suspicious (I guess he just has enough of them floating around that a prisoner being given one to look at isn't unlikely). He murmurs to himself about how he WILL catch that owl lady sooner or later, and reshapes his hand into a giant hammer and smashes some bars apart to emphasize the point. He's got some shapeshifting powers, then. Don't think his minion that we saw before could do that. The little conspiracy theorist ball starts trash-talking him, and he pulls her out of her cell for some sort of punishment.

Touchy.

After the warden leaves and Luce and Il can come back out, the former expresses her sympathy for the prisoners and tries to release them. Unfortunately, the levers are either too heavy for her to move, or magically locked against intruders (I'm thinking probably the former, if humans are able to penetrate magical defenses like what Wrath has around the vault). So, she's forced to leave them behind and just look for the vault.

Before the vault entrance, the two are rejoined by Ida. She's diverted most of the soldiers with a runaround, and the warden himself is busy "tormenting some tiny creature," so it should be smooth sailing from here. Il works the door open, and then Luce climbs through the magical barrier around the confiscated items themselves to recover the crown, which she gives to Il.

It's not a very impressive crown, as it turns out.

Either this particular piece of fast foot marketing paraphernalia is heavily enchanted, or Il only ever thought he was a mighty demon lord. Also, he just picked up that stuffed bunny that fill out of the pile and granted it a knighthood among his infernal legions. The stuffed bunny does not react to this, so I'm thinking it's the second one.

And yeah, Ida confirms it. Il is just a little fuzzy thing who thinks that one of her dumpster-diving hauls makes him powerful, and she cares about getting it back because its important enough to him to be worth as much as an actual magical crown emotionally. And, well. Weirdos have to stick together.

Luce starts to find this heartwarming. Moreso when Ida tells her that she'll send her home now, a deal's a deal. Unfortunately, that's when Warden Wrath sneaks up behind Ida and decapitates her with an armblade. That's not lethal for Ida, with her tinker-toy like anatomy, but it's highly incapacitating.

He explains that he took her pet's toy because he knew she'd come after it sooner or later. When she ran distraction before, he had his men pretend to fall for it while actually leading the main bulk of them to ambush them here.

Competent villainy! It's a rare treasure, I like it.

After destroying Il's crown in front of him like a total dick, Warden Wrath says that now that he's finally captured Ida, he can do what he's been meaning to.

Her ability to elude him and defeat his minions for year after year has fascinated him, and that fascination became infatuation.

Heh. When she saw the wanted posters before, Luce snarked that "these guys must really have the hots for (Ida)." Turns out she was literally rather than ironically correct.

Wrath goes on to say that as the Boiling Isles' most powerful witch and most feared warlord, they would make a power couple unlike any the worlds have seen. Also, he has her at knife point and surrounded by minions, so it's not like she can say no.

Luce says aloud that "I hate everything you're saying right now," which prompts the warden to turn his arm into a bunch of tentacles and start choking her.

Fortunately, Ida tricks him into bringing her severed head close enough to his mask for her to spit in his eyes, making him drop Luce long enough for the latter to grab Ida's owl staff and bring it down on Wrath's head just like Ida did to that soldier before. And, despite his apparently shapeless anatomy, the warden goes down. Either that staff has a knockout attack spell built into it alongside its many other powers, or the warden's head and brain are solid and its just his limbs that can shapeshift. Also, Ida can remotely control her body now, where it seemed that she couldn't a second ago. Maybe the warden's grasp blocked her powers or something? Or maybe she was already slowly moving her body into striking position, and Luce just gave her an opening to move it faster. Anyway, her body takes out the guards before they can retaliate against Luce, and the three of them escape on the flying owlstaff, freeing as many prisoners as they can with Ida and Luce's combined strength as they fly passed the cell bloc.

Or, at least they start to. Wrath recovers after just seconds, and his tentacle-limbs let him move at least as quickly in this indoor environment as the staff can. He manages to close the distance and knock them to the ground before they can escape the castle.

Ida, seeming to regret her previous treatment of Luze, or perhaps just considering it a favor owed, distracts Wrath while tossing Luce back onto the staff and sending it flying off. Meanwhile, Il assures Luce that this guy isn't as bad as several of Ida's actual ex-boyfriends, so they can handle this. I find myself not doubting that assertion in the slightest. Even when Wrath removes his plague doctor mask to do this:

Fiery breath and ugliness aside, his teeth look awfully similar to those of the skin-eating fairy that Luce encountered before. Related species, perhaps? Could just be coincidental, but it caught my attention.

Ida uses some portal magic to turn the toothy dragon-man's fire attack back at him. Meanwhile, Luce manages to get the hang of steering the owl staff, and lands herself before a breach that the ongoing battle has created in the prison bloc's wall. The prisoners she met before (including the little conspiracy ball, who appears bruised but not seriously mutilated) are standing there, watching the fight in fear and uncertainty, seemingly unsure of whether they should be trying to help or making a break for it. When asked why they aren't doing anything, though, they tell Luce that they're actually just hopeless. If they escape, the warden will just catch them again sooner or later. Also, it's not like there's much for them to go back to, as the surrounding society seems to have largely cooperated with Wrath's policies in this regard. Luce gives them a pep talk about how yadda yadda, they're great how they are, weirdos need to stick together, they shouldn't have to be afraid just because of things they can't change about themselves, etc. This inspires them to run forward in a group and tackle Wrath while he has his hands full with Ida and Il. Luce gives a victory speech plagiarized from her fantasy novel, and then uses his own fire breath to detonate the mass of fireworks she was apparently smuggling to normal-away camp with her (um...) in his face. The warden retreats in one direction, and the escapees in the other.

Back at the Owl House, Ida thanks Luce for helping her and Il out of that trap, and says she'll send her home now. Luce gives Il a replacement toy crown from one of her action figures, and starts to leave through the recreated portal. Before she steps through, she sees a reflection of herself in the mirror next to those of the fantasy novel cover with its warrior princess, and the normal-away flier with the grinning boy stuffed into a box.

She stops, turns around, and asks Ida if instead of sending her home, she can try and teach her magic. When Ida asks her wtf, she explains that she's an outcast weirdo of the human world herself, that weirdos need to stick together, etc. Ida says that she doesn't think that humans can actually use magic even if taught, but - with some encouragement from Il, who has really grown to like Luce - she says she'll be willing to try. Luce is given a spare bedroom.

And, either there's a microportal that radio signals can travel through still open in the Owl House, or Luce has already cast her first successful spell on her smartphone, because she can send and receive interdimensional texts.

Seems like she's planning to spend three months in the Boiling Isles' world, and then return home as if from the normal-away camp, while updating her mom with fake messages every few days. Il curls up on her "sleeping cocoon" to sleep alongside her, in convincingly catlike fashion. The end.


A lot of that definitely felt familiar, in an Adventure Time and/or Gravity Falls kind of way. Well written and animated for the most part. The humor was consistently on point. Really, I'd say the gags and witty banter were actually a high point throughout, and I enjoyed the warden as an unusually deft antagonist by kids' show standards.

The messaging still bugs me, though. In part because I've seen American media in particular make exactly this mistake so many damned times now. You do a story about people (either a stand-in for some real life disadvantaged group, or just general "outcasts") being unjustly persecuted by society...but then accidentally make society's treatment of them completely justified. The inmates in Wrath's prison seemed totally innocent, sure, but Anne was in trouble for doing actually harmful things, and Ida...well, she seems like someone who even non-corrupt authorities would have good reason to be after. A heroic-ish conwoman is fine, but when you try to paint society's treatment of her as equally unjust to what Wrath was doing to people who write bad fanfiction, it's just...no.

Anyway, looking at Owl House and Amphibia side by side, they're definitely variations on a theme. New spins on the children's portal fantasy genre for the new decade ahead of us. Both of them did something new-ish with the format (in Amphibia's case, making a native the POV character of the pilot. In Owl House's, making it a temporary, voluntary world-hop with open lines of communication back home). It's kind of hard to compare them, since Amphibia is a 12 minute show meant for young children and Owl House is a 22 minute one meant for somewhat older ones, but taking these factors into account I think Amphibia's was the stronger pilot. Both in terms of creative approaches to the subject matter, and with regard to themes and messaging.