Review: Amphibia “Handy Anne; Fort on the Road”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

It’s been three months since the last season’s finale and Anne is right back in her old spirits!…mostly. She’s still shaken up about what happened with Sasha, though she’s keeping it down. In the meantime, Hop Pop has obtained a family wagon, or Fwagon, in order to make the journey to Newtopia, a city fully of knowledgeable newts who may know how to get Anne home. And maybe they’ll run into Marcy, Anne’s other human friend who hopefully isn’t evil. But since they’ll be leaving the house unprotected, they’ll leave it in the care of Chuck, the guy who grows tulips. Anne is less than impressed and decides to beef up the house security herself with extra armoring, disaster proofing, and weird gunk for the plants to protect the crops. This goes…poorly, as one would expect, as the plants form a giant kaiju that ends up destroying the house. In her rage, Anne easily destroys the monster, though Chuck comes back and repairs the house in full, proving he’s capable of the job.

With that, Plantars begin their journey to Newtopia, though Hop Pop has rules for the road trip that range from the practical to the just plain wet blanket. Things hit a boiling point when they reach the “Ruins of Despair”, the remnants of some long lost society, so Anne and Sprig sneak out to go look at things, accidentally uncovering weird ancient technology that almost crushes Hop Pop. Sprig manages to break it by cramming a book in a disc port, though it seems a robot from the chamber has reached the surface.

OUR TAKE

New season! New opening sequence! New ending credit art and music! Lots and lots of new! I actually only came upon this show because it had a similar premise to The Owl House, which I was covering when that started airing. What I ended up finding was probably a series in all ways Owl House’s superior for a number of reasons, leading me to binge the first season and only catch up the day before this aired. And given that the first season of Amphibia was by all means a solid and strong starter on its own, it would then make sense that its second season would likely take that energy with it into its next installment. Thankfully this turned out to be a good guess, as the second season’s premiere proves to have everything the first had to make me instantly fall in love, as well as some hints on what could add to it on the horizon.

These first two stories do bring back the cast to the status quo viewers are familiar with, though now adding that the journey will be on the road like a few of the first season episodes were (which makes me wonder if those weren’t actually Season 2 episodes placed early?). With that in mind, I wasn’t that surprised that the Plantar house got destroyed at the end of the first half, but MORE surprised that it got put back together. Destroying the house would be a pretty on the nose way of saying that they couldn’t go home again, with the possibility of it being rebuilt by the time they got back, but now it’s back to its old glory so…that takes care of that, I suppose. We then get a look at what these road trip stories will be like going forward with Anne and Plantars heading from place to place of varying plot relevance. Their destination is Newtopia, introducing a third amphibious species in addition to Frogs and Toads, so I’m gonna hazard a guess that Marcy will be learning from them like Anne and Sasha were learning from the other two. And naturally I don’t expect we’ve seen the last of Sasha or the Toads, nor whatever this weird technology is. All in all, this was a fine opening course for what’s ahead, so let’s hope this frog show has legs. Though not for eating, just for running.