How The Amazing World Of Gumball Finale Predicted The Animated Purges

Armed with a witty script, the cartoon encapsulated a range of meta humor. The team also infamously crafted a biting response to the China-animated "Miracle Star" knock-off in the form of an episode where the Wattersons outwit a "copycat" family.

But the cartoon reached its apotheosis in its variation of the "no money means literally no animation" act (a trope performed by "Chowder," where the main characters overspend and their world is stripped down to show the live voice actors in their voice booths). In "The Money," Gumball debated his family on whether to "sell out" to a Joyful Burger commercial to escape debt — a critique of commercialist and capitalistic impositions on art.

And then their entire house gets carted off by debt collectors. Suddenly, Gumball and his family are drained of their color. His sister's mouth flaps goes wayward. Darwin devolves into a sloppy doodle. The epiphany hits hard to Gumball: "When you don't have money, your whole world falls apart." Their photo-based neighborhood disintegrates and the details strip away into nothingness. This culminates into a race across the destabilizing landscape: a CGI character convulses, houses become gray and de-render into geometric basics, the CGI bus glitches and throttles out of control, the Wattersons' bodies dissolve into doodles on post-it notes, and their chase becomes a series of storyboards with scratch voices. The world returns to its colorful stability just as the Wattersons sign the commercial contract — while Gumball remains in his doodle form because he has refused.

HBO Max streaming has been in the news cycle for a series of disruptive business decisions — conducted by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav — as part of the Warner Bros. merger with Discovery. For starters, HBO Max removed 37 titles, predominantly animated projects, to cut the costs of licensing fees. Among the cartoons wiped out from the HBO Max streaming were "Gumball" Cartoon Network contemporaries like "OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes," "Infinity Train," and "Summer Camp Island." Animators, such as Julia Potts of "Summer Camp Island," expressed their ire over the lack of warning. It (re)ignited a whole conversation about fairly compensating animators and ensuring their ownership of their work. In spite of concerns of cancellations, animated projects like the "Batman: Caped Crusaders" series are to be shopped to another streamer rather than be slotted onto HBO Max. Needless to say, the purge is like a rude cartoon mallet popping out of nowhere to smash the purpose of Cartoon Network as an accessible preservation of cartoons.

As for "The Amazing World of Gumball," the series ended up surviving the purge on HBO Max. However, not unlike "Batman: Caped Crusaders," its incoming Gumball-verse projects are to be shopped to another streamer. Right now, the "The Amazing World of Gumball: The Movie" and the following spin-off show "The Amazing World of Gumball: The Series" (both working titles) have to find a new home that's not HBO Max.

There's also the matter of the cliffhanger.

But Rob claims he intends no malice. 

"Don't you understand what's going on in Elmore?" he says. "You have two choices. Live in ignorance what's gonna happen here. Or listen to what I have to say. It might just save your lives. The reason I've been trying to transform you—"

But he's whacked unconscious. When he wakes up alone on the school floor, Rob bemoans, "Transformation is the only chance they have of escaping to the other place and this world–" Any further answers from his lamentations are cut off when the floor disintegrates into a pit of static. Hanging from the tiles (literalizing a cliffhanger), he realizes that the doom has become reality. He falls into the white light. The show just ... freezes right there with the ominous jingle of the show's theme.

"The Amazing World of Gumball: The Movie" project will likely provide answers. Where did Rob get sucked into? Devoted fans can speculate that the pit is the same Void dimension — where "mistakes," like disco and an expy of the memetically disliked Clippy, were discarded by the universe — that Rob was cast into. Back in "The Void," Gumball and Darwin charged into that dimension to rescue a classmate erased out of existence (a parody of the trope where a minor or background character in a series can disappear with little to no explanation).

What is that "other place" that Rob references as an escape, potentially a sanctuary? It could very well be a human world — perhaps ours. 

"The Amazing World of Gumball" fanbase is still waiting to exactly learn what armageddon will swallow Elmore. Rob senses that the radically-shifted status quo will be unkind to the cartoon world. Against the tide of the HBO Max purges, the abrupt finale acquires an uncanny currency. It depicts the existential fear that a grand force will swallow the vibrance of a cartoon world and seek to cleanse it — perhaps in favor of something blander than Elmore. 

"The Inquisition" isn't so much a prophecy as it is an acknowledgement of industry pattern that existed before. Rob wants to play by the rules of the incoming new world order to save them from becoming disposable "mistakes." He believes that forced assimilation into a proper form — fitting in with something "real" in the most literal definition — will be their salvation. Or it's the rejection void for them. But for Gumball, Darwin, and the rest, they'll much happier sticking to their colorful physics-defying-high-fiving selves. To forcibly erase that would defeat the purpose and possibilities of their designs.

But Elmore's cartoony future — the movie that's supposed to bridge into the spin-off show — does rest on finding a new home: some "other place" outside of HBO Max.