You should watch The Hollow on Netflix

 It can be difficult to keep up with everything that Netflix puts out but The Hollow is one that deserves to be sought out.

Within the last decade or so, a surge of excellent animated television has arisen and a lot of  it wide-ranging, pushing the idea of animation as a medium and not a genre.

In that spirit, earlier this month Netflix released The Hollow. It’s the latest venture from Vito Viscomi, who has worked on a great many cartoons over the years and created Nerds and Monsters and Yvon on the Yukon, a weird little animated series that feels like if The Maze Runner was mixed with equal parts Over the Garden Wall, and Gravity Falls. The Hollow follows Adam (Adrian Petriw), Kai (Connor Parnall), and Mira (Ashleigh Ball), three teenagers who wake up in an underground hatch with no memory of who they or how they got there, save for a slip of paper in their pockets with their name on it.

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From there, the trio is introduced to a world that is rather sinister and frightening, coming up against ravenous dogs, irritable minotaurs, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They’re occasionally assisted by The Weird Guy, a magical man who taunts and sends them to a different section of the world.

A big part of what makes this series works is the way that it slowly deconstructs the genre that it inhabits, one that doesn’t even reveal itself until the final episodes. It embraces the landscape for genre television that was popularized by J.J. Abrams and his “mystery box” approach to storytelling where the audience is not only trying to crack the mystery but the characters themselves, too. When a character finally figures out where they are, it’s met with as much skepticism as the rest of the insane that had been thrown around earlier in the season. So it starts seeding in these tropes that are familiar to fans of the sandbox that the show is playing in, such as the main characters discovering that they have superpowers and going off in search of a macguffin to get them back home.

Another thing that really lends to the series’ success is the strength of the three characters and how well they work together in a believable teen/pre-teen way. They each have their pros and cons and effectively compliment each other well.

One part that could take a moment for people to get used to, but is great nonetheless, is the beautiful animation itself that the series has to offer. It looks and moves in a way that is different from so many other shows and films. Fans of the medium often expect animation to look a different way and sometimes chaff against it if it looks demonstrably separate from that. Especially with the debates recently surrounding “Caltech” animation, this is one to really embrace.

Not only is this a truly fantastic freshman season for this Netflix show, the way that it leaves off is also simultaneously fascinating and bewildering with the direction that it can take a second season.

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The Hollow is now streaming on Netflix. Are you planning on watching this or have you already? Let us know in the comments below.