In Search of a Just Frog

June 29, 2021

Wearing a bathing suit, shorts, and a backpack, Anne gestures to a sign that reads "DON'T SWIM" with a kind of "oh come on" facial expression. Sprig looks up at her neutrally.

Many early Amphibia episodes are structured formulaically around Anne’s moral development. Take Best Fronds (101b), The Domino Effect (104a), and Anne Theft Auto (105a) as examples.

  1. Someone—usually Anne—makes a bad decision. Anne ignores the Don’t Swim sign, and she pressures Sprig into swimming against his will. | Anne sneaks a wild animal into the house without telling Hop Pop. | Anne drives Bessie without reading the manual.
  2. Their decision has bad consequences. Anne and Sprig are attacked by a lake monster. | Anne’s new “pet” causes murderous mayhem. | Bessie suddenly refuses to move, and Anne is stranded.
  3. They fix their mistake, often learning a valuable moral lesson. Anne and Sprig defeat the lake monster, and Anne apologizes for not listening to Sprig. | Anne releases the animal back into the wild. | Anne reads Bessie’s manual, allowing her to both escape danger and better appreciate the snail.

Not every episode follows this script. Anne isn’t the only character who messes up—often it’s Sprig, sometimes Hop Pop. The show even occasionally pokes fun at its own moral-of-the-week storytelling (e.g. 117a, 119a) or puts aside the moralism altogether (e.g. 107b).

Amphibia season 1: Very thick book. Season 1 if Anne consistently followed the rules and listened to Hop Pop’s advice: very thin book.

By and large, though, Anne and Sprig are characterized as selfish youths, while Hop Pop is the elder voice of reason. By my count, a full seventeen episodes from season 1 feature Anne in the role of mistake-maker. Sprig, closest to her in age, is in second place with ten. Hop Pop’s mistakes incite only six episodes*—and one of those mistakes is listening to Anne instead of following tradition (109b). Season 1 Wartwood is a realm where adult guardians usually have the moral high ground, and where flouting their advice usually invites disaster. (The exceptions are important, and I’ll get to them in a second.) (*This count is subjective, since there are plenty of corner cases. It’s also preliminary; my numbers will probably change once I finish my season 1 rewatch.)

Amphibia-as-dream invites us to consider that these morality plays aren’t meant to be taken at face value. After all, Sasha’s and Marcy’s episodes tend to be much less didactic than Anne’s (and the exceptions tend to be set in Wartwood—e.g. 216b, 219b). Perhaps, just as Toad Tower is born of Sasha’s desire to control her friends, Wartwood is born of Anne’s desire for moral guidance.

Anne takes the music box off the shelf of a thrift store. She looks uncertainly through the window at Sasha, who's giving her a thumbs up, and Marcy, who's smirking.

On her thirteenth birthday, Anne is faced with a whole bunch of dilemmas. She’s visibly uncomfortable with much of Sasha’s behavior, from vandalism to reckless cart racing, but she goes along with it anyway. This culminates when Sasha coerces Anne into skipping her family’s birthday party (120), and again when Anne steals the music box to satisfy a friend (almost certainly Sasha) even though she really doesn’t want to (101b).

While we can pin most or all of the blame on Sasha’s emotional abuse, Anne doesn’t share our outsider’s perspective. She feels ashamed of her actions. Guilty. And she wants to be held accountable.

In a broader sense, Anne is scared to grow up. With age comes agency, and she doesn’t trust herself to make good decisions. She really, really hopes that the adults in her life know what they’re doing, because she could use a helping hand.

Enter Wartwood in all its glorious moralism.

1: Hop Pop looks up and smiles, brandishing a large book titled "Ye Olde Ways: A Cook Book" with a picture of a snail on it. 2: Hop Pop shoves a book into a surprised Anne's hands. It's titled "Bessie's History," and has a picture of Bessie the snail on it. 3: A huge book is open in front of Anne and Hop Pop, a red bookmark draped across the open page. Hop Pop excitedly points to Anne, while Anne slumps in her chair with a look of abject misery. 4: A pair of roange hnads lay a book on the table titled "Hop Pop's Road Rules" with a picture of hills on it. Atop a hill, under the stars, Anne and Sprig lean against a moss-cover wall and read books by the light of a single candle. Anne is smiling. Sprig is sleepy. "Executive producer: Matt Braly."

The book paradox neatly symbolizes Anne’s relationship to adult authority. In Anne’s schema, books signify tradition and adult authority (e.g. 103a, 105a, 110a, 201b). She regularly eschews reading, just as she eschews authority in general. Yet the original closing-credits scene, a framing device for the whole first season, shows Anne and Sprig reading happily. Despite Anne’s surface-level reluctance, she does actually want to learn from the adults in her life.

A cartoonishly large visage of Anne's mother, looking very stressed, looms over a toddler Anne, who's holding a cooking utensil in each hand.

It’s not that Anne wants her grownups to be perfect; she already knows they aren’t. Her relationship with her parents, for example, is good but not great. She describes her mom as “kind, in her own way. But strict, too. She wanted me to study more. Thought I goofed off too much. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye” (209b). Yet Anne misses her mother deeply, and—unlike Marcy and possibly Sasha—actually wants to reunite with her parents.

So sometimes Hop Pop makes the inciting mistake (e.g. 104b). Sometimes he and Anne learn from each other (e.g. 103a, 103b) instead of Anne getting a one-way scolding. Anne’s okay with imperfections. She’s okay with the occasional fuckup.

As long as her adults are mostly wise and mostly just.

It's night. There's a hole under a tree. Hop Pop looks up at Anne with large, pleading eyes. Anne, looking scared and uncertain, takes a back.

Hop Pop’s burying of the music box (213b) is more than an enormous violation of trust. From Anne’s perspective, it’s also evidence of an upsetting truth: adult authority figures don’t always have her best interests at heart.