Singing, dancing and colourful darkness: The bright shadows of Centaurland

If you’re like Horse (Kimiko Glenn), and honestly who of us hasn’t felt at times like a warhorse magically transported from a land near-destroyed by neverending conflict to a place full of colour, vibrancy and magical creatures (only all the time, right?), then you might find being in Centaurworld just a little discombobulating at first.

But unlike Horse, who understandably take a while to adapt to the candy-coated vividness of her strange new home, audiences will find themselves near instantly happy to take a gallantly excitable swan dive into the sugar-fuelled joy that is the new animated series Megan Nicole Dong (Sketchshark) and wallow around in its rainbow saturated hues for as long as humanly possible.

Just why that is becomes clear pretty much at the start of the first episode which, interestingly, starts in the very bleak, scorched earth desolation of Horse’s homeland and not in the wacky, Crayola-soaked fabulousness of Centaurland where all the inhabitants are some form of human/animal/horse hybrid.

It’s in Horse’s homeland that we meet her and her best friend Rider (Jessie Mueller) who together are some of the last people fighting to stop the rampaging minotaurs who attack with ferocity and frightening indifference to loss of life from taking their homes away completely.

Their last hope is a strange artifact that Rider has been told will be their salvation but just as she’s about to hand it across to the General, who we never see, minotaurs attack and Horse and Rider are separated, with the former finding herself in a land where everyone talks and singing at seemingly random intervals is pretty much de rigeur.

Centaurworld is a continuous 10-episode musical and the songs which adorn its perfectly executed just under half-hour episodes are some of the best you will find in any musical period.

That may sound like an overly grand claim but again, the first song alone will convince of the veracity of that statement.

Horse is desperately freaked out and alone in a world that on the surface looks abundantly better than anything back in her war-ravaged homeland but which is so weirdly colourful and frenetically, unremittingly sassy and alive than it can’t possibly feel like home to her.

She’s also separated from Rider, and so, “Rider’s Lullaby”, which tugs at your heartstrings with muscular poignancy so pronounced they might just break, comes into play, expressing the great sadness she feels at better a million miles away, or it seems, from everything and everyone she knows.

But hey, this is Centaurworld, an entire paint set upended onto all the multi-hued glitter ever made and awash in all the giddy vivacity of every technicolour dream you’ve ever had, and it’s not long until she finds a new group of friends, whether she wants them or not.

And honestly, so unnerved is she by her lushly kaleidoscopic new home, that she finds pretty much hard to keep her new “herd” at bay.

But overly-caffeinated and pink as hyperactive fairy floss leader, Wammawink (Megan Hilty), who like everyone in Centaurworld can use magic to shoot tiny versions of themselves out of their hooves – why? No one knows but it’s remarked often, a running joke that can’t help but bring a smile to your face – will not be denied and she goes all out to charm and them passively aggressively demand, with a sugary voice and a smile so hardcore it makes you wonder where everyone’s else happiness is, Horse.

In her group of friends, who depend on her for leadership, friendship and “giggle cakes” (pancakes with personality!) are flamboyant, mirror-obsessed zebra-like centaur Julius (Parvesh Cheena), Durpleton (Josh Radnor) who’s adorably sweet but a few acacia leaves short of a full tree, Glendale (Megan Nicole Dong) who’s chief claim to fame, apart from a highly-strung disposition is a glowing stomach portal into which the kleptomaniac puts everything she purloins, and tough as nails but maybe heart of gold-ish Ched (Chris Diamantopoulos) who is constantly sniping at Horse for reasons that never become entirely clear.

They’re a weirdly dysfunctional found family but they work in their own strange way, and in no time flat, but not without some serious pushback from Wammawink who is none too pleased to have Horse encouraging everyone to leave the valley they have always called home to venture across Centaurworld to find a way for her to get home.

The exchange between Horse and Wammawink at this point cleverly establishes one reality of this seemingly idyllic land – things may not be quite as perfect or wonderful as everyone makes out and indeed Glendale lets slip at some point that they’ve only just survived some fierce battles of their own.

There’s also more than a few hints as they lift the protective dome of their home valley and head out into the delightfully bonkers silliness of Centaurworld that behind and below all the shimmering luminosity, sunglasses necessitating colurfulness and the heady quips and surreal hilarity, sits some quite uncomfortable darkness.

Granted, it’s not Horse’s homeland level horrific undertones but it’s apparently enough, if you’re looking for it, to suggest, that perhaps all the fantastical gaiety may be covering a festering cesspool of yuck.

That is many ways the true gift of Centaurworld.

Created by a person who clearly loves animation and brought to side-splittingly funny and teardrop-pouring poignant life by a team with an obsessive love for the many creative possibilities it offers, Centaurworld makes full use of its wildly imaginative premise, its fabulously over the top worldbuilding and the wide as an ocean heart as its centre at every hugely entertaining turn.

Filled to the sentient leaf brim with side jokes, visual madness and a prodigious aptitude for balancing the wackadoodle strange with the soberly serious, the show goes all out to tell a story that may seem almost exclusively fancifully out there but which is rich with the kind of emotive depth other far more serious shows would kill to have humming through their narrative veins.

So perfectly do these two seemingly disparate elements meld together that it’s entirely possible to be clapping your hands wildly with maniacal glee and laughing so hard it’s entirely you might even shoot tiny versions of yourself out of your feet, and then a minute or two later to be crying your eyes out at some soul-stirringly moving moment.

The writing is so good that there’s never a single second of dissonance between these two extremes, with the songs sliding in so smoothly you get up from watching two to three episodes at a go wondering why is it that everyone you now isn’t bursting into song mid-conversation.

Honestly, it, and a whole of other things, seem entirely possible after the effervescently gorgeous world of the centaurs has worked its neon-fabulous magic on you, and it’s a credit to the team behind the show that something so outrageously silly ends up feeling entirely natural, real and reassuringly authentic.

It’s a joy to immerse yourself in and whether you are laughing, crying or wishing you had Julius’s self-obsessed chutzpah or Glendale’s capacity for internalised storage, or a meaningful friendship like the one that eventually develops between Wammawink and Horse, you will be delighted every stop of the technicolour rainbow-suffused way by Centaurworld which deftly mixes music and song, hilarious quips and emotional profundity, and world-changing, expansive adventuring so consummately well that you wish you could stay with Horse and her new herd and see where the rainbow-coloured, often whimsical but definitely dark road takes you.

(Hopefully to a second season though that has yet to be confirmed.)