Early career McHale graduated from the
California Institute of the Arts in
Santa Clarita in 2006 with a
BFA in
character animation. He began his professional career at
Cartoon Network Studios in 2007, as a writer and
storyboard artist on
Thurop Van Orman's
The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. He helped Van Orman create ten episodes. The one-shot character Punsie McKale was inspired by and modeled after McHale. After leaving
Flapjack, he joined fellow CalArts alum and
Flapjack storyboard artist
Pendleton Ward to help develop Ward's
Adventure Time short into an animated series,
Adventure Time. Once the show was picked up, McHale stayed as the show's
creative director through the show's second season. Then he moved to
New York City with his wife and fellow filmmaker Jiwook Kim. He continued to freelance for the show in the capacity of writing some songs and providing input on story outlines until the middle of season five.
Tome of the Unknown and Over the Garden Wall In October 2011, he began to make the eight-minute animated short
Tome of the Unknown, which was produced as part of Cartoon Network's
shorts development program. Unlike the other pilots, released online on
Cartoon Network Video, the film was showcased during the festival circuit throughout 2013 and early 2014. It received The Bruce Corwin Award for Best Animated Short Film at the
Santa Barbara International Film Festival in
Santa Barbara, California. The short became the basis for a ten-part
miniseries Over the Garden Wall, which premiered over five consecutive nights in November 2014.
Tome of the Unknown was streamed online in May 2015. McHale won a National Cartoonists Society Reuben award as the creator of
Over the Garden Wall, in the category for TV Animation. The series won an
Emmy Award for Best Animated Program. In the same year, McHale's
Over the Garden Wall won Best Animated Feature at the
Ottawa International Animation Festival in
Ottawa, Canada. In 2016, McHale received an
Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids as the creator and a writer of the
Over the Garden Wall comic book featuring the characters who first appeared in the television series. In 2015,
Frederator Studios announced that McHale would direct an 11-minute adaptation of
Costume Quest. On February 22, 2015, he released an original album via his
Bandcamp page titled
The End. In 2017, director
Guillermo del Toro announced that McHale would co-write the script to del Toro's stop-motion adaptation of
Pinocchio. In February 2021,
Netflix announced that McHale would serve as scriptwriter for an animated film adaptation of the novel
Redwall by
Brian Jacques, an
English author. By December 2022, McHale left the project due to changes at
Netflix Animation. Netflix would end up abandoning the project in April, 2026. In April 7, 2023, he released the album
Those Wild Days in collaboration with J.R. Kaufman from the band
The Blasting Company through Bandcamp. On June 14, 2024, it was announced that McHale returned to Cartoon Network Studios to be part of the development team for
“The Adventure Time Movie” movie alongside
Rebecca Sugar and
Adam Muto. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of
Over the Garden Wall, McHale collaborated with
Aardman Animation to create a
stop motion short featuring characters from the show. The short film was uploaded to
YouTube on November 3, 2024 by Cartoon Network. He co-wrote the short with Dan Ojari and
Mikey Please. On June 12, 2025,
Adult Swim announced that McHale alongside
Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar and
Ian Jones-Quartey were developing an animated special under the name ''
Adult Swim's The Elephant'' which debuted on December 19, 2025. In December 2025, McHale revealed that he was developing a live-action/
puppetry feature film that acts as a spiritual successor to "
Over The Garden Wall" but that several studios haven't picked it up. ==Filmography==