Twelve Forever is a 25 part animated series centred around Regina (Reggie), a 13 year old girl who doesnt want to throw away her toys. She instead travels to a fantastic land, called the Endless, where her toys come to life and she becomes Twelve, the super awesome athletic hero of the world. Todd, her best friend, has morphing powers and their friend Esther has flying abilities. Together they fight the ills of society and puberty. The show is cute and sweet as it is presented in a superflat art style, familiar with fans of Adventure Time, but it deals with real weighty emotional issues such as dealing but being a young carer, societal expectations of beauty, negative formative experiences and much more.

In episode 2, we are introduced to the big bad of the show, the Butt Witch, voiced by Matt Berry of It Crowd and Disenchantment fame. For the duration of the series he tries to destroy the optimistic and fantastical world of Endless by corrupting its citizens.

Across 25 episodes the three lead characters go through many of the perils we've all probably experienced in our lives but it is presented through the fantastical world of Endless. If I were being pretentious I would say that the series was showing the pre-pubescent to pubescent forms of Ego, Super Ego and the Id and its effect on youth. According to Freud's psychoanalytic personality model, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains our innate human drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the superego. The three characters represent the 3 parts of Freud’s theory which is a characterisation common in many stories ranging from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings; Reggie is the Id, Esther is the Super Ego and Todd is the Ego.

As you can see, for a 'kids' cartoon this show does get deep and it presents quite difficult concepts at a child friendly level. As a grown up man-child the show had me reflecting on my own childhood and some of the trials and tribulations I faced. Twelve Forever is a solid show that looks at positive representation and with each episode being only about 13 minutes long, it is easily bingeable if that's your wont to do. Check it out on Netflix!