Vox: You also have some teenage and adult characters. The teenagers are kind of mysterious. Their motivations aren't always understood. Meanwhile, the adults seem like they're almost there to be disappointed or even angry in a way that the kids don't always understand. How do you guys approach those characters, especially knowing parents and kids will be watching this together? AH: The show is meant to be seen from the perspective of Dipper and Mabel and being as they are in that year-old, not quite kids, not quite teens, nowhere space, we try to write every character from their perspective.
Grunkle Stan, in their perspective, you spend the summer with a relative that you don't know, and they always feel very mysterious. Me and my sister spent our summers with our great-aunt Lois, and at 8 o'clock every day, she'd say, "Alright.
It's book time for three hours. God only knows what she was doing during book time. Maybe gardening. Maybe taking a nap. Maybe running a crime syndicate. It could be literally anything. So Grunkle Stan's general, larger-than-life mystery comes from that way you feel when you're a kid about your older relatives, particularly the more distant ones, like gosh, this mythical sense of who on Earth are they?
In terms of teenagers, I remember when I was middle school age, there was literally nothing on Earth more terrifying or more alluring than actual, real teenagers. Nothing could possibly make you feel better than to get approval from a real teenager when you're 12, and nothing could possibly be worse than having to be with one of them who didn't care for you.
So that's really all that comes from how can we make this feel the way things felt at that age? In terms of appealing to audiences of all ages, the question I get asked the most is like, "Oh, so, how do you try to plan it so parents enjoy it as well as kids?
There's something in there for the parents too. There's never this moment of, "Wait, it's too young. Throw in a winking joke about something for the parents. It's always like that. I think I myself am sort of a weird manchild, and so if I like something, there's a good chance that it will appeal to both men and children [Laughs. I find that you get the best result if you just try to make yourself laugh and not worry about what other people think.
If you're tuned in enough, it'll turn out good. And if not, you'll get Darwin'd out of the process and start selling lightbulbs or something. AH: I can't answer an influence question without saying The Simpsons, first and last. I grew up on The Simpsons, and The Simpsons was what showed me as a kid that animation could be as smart and funny as live-action and sometimes smarter and funnier.
I, personally, loved comedy. I love the comedies that are out there right now. I grew up in the '90s. I'm crazy about those shows. My goal was never to work in kids TV, and I was not even attempting that or planning on doing that, and then Disney called me up right out of college and said pitch us something.
I thought, aw heck, a kids show, gosh, what kids show on Earth would I even want to watch? I thought, okay, I'd love to just make a straight-up, balls to the wall comedy but I'll never get away with half of the jokes that make me laugh on other networks on the Disney Channel.
So if I can't just be a pure, crazy comedy for comedy's sake, maybe I need to be one part comedy, one part mystery, one part sweet, family adventure. I come from comedy, and all the other ingredients in the show are the departures. Those are the things that I'm actually not familiar with that I'm inventing as I go along. Vox: The serialized story in season one played out in the background, then became very important.
How much of that did you plan out? AH: On season one, most of that stuff was pretty planned out. We wanted season one to be pretty continuity light. There were a few tentpoles that we knew about from a distance, about places where the series was heading, and so we had five or six things that we knew for sure, okay, this will happen in this season, so we can reference or hint about it in this season.
Season two has way more of that stuff, because season one was an experiment. I think a lot of folks who don't work in kids TV don't realize this, but kids animation is its own strange subset of the entertainment industry, and animated kid shows, made in America, on the big three networks, Disney, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon, they are always 11 minutes.
They are short. They are like SpongeBob. SpongeBob is a show that's 11 minutes. Adventure Time is a show that's 11 minutes. They are over in 11 minutes. They have two 11s in a half hour, and they have their own short structure, and then usually shows like SpongeBob push a reset button. If something explodes in one episode of SpongeBob , in the next episode, it is rebuilt, it is beautiful, right where it used to be, with no indication that it ever exploded.
As a kid that would drive me utterly insane, because I think as a kid I was spoiled by shows for an older audience that wouldn't forget their own canon, and then I'd watch shows from my own age group and be like, "Why do they think I can't remember this?
This show was an experiment. I thought, I'm not going to make an 11 minute. I'm not going to make a show that resets every time. In this limited kids TV pipeline, I'm going to try to make full half-hours, and I'm going to make this thing be one big growing story because that's the kind of thing that I would have begged for as a kid and never found enough of. I also thought, gosh, why doesn't anybody do this?
Why aren't there any shows like this in kids TV? Not on anime kids TV. Anime's been doing it for years, the serialization. Western kids animation's basically never done it. I thought everyone was just being lazy. There are a lot of TV shows and movies that try so hard to reach that sweet spot where they can appeal to kids, parents and young adults, but fall painfully short. Gravity Falls, though, hits that spot brilliantly. Like his fellow CalArts alumni Quintel and Ward, Hirsch's product is one made out of love and care and it's made clear in every episode.
Most impressively, though, is that it gives me a reason to watch the Disney Channel. FAQ 1. Is Gravity Falls going to have a second season? Details Edit. Release date June 15, United States. United States. Hulu Official site. Seattle, Washington, USA. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 23 minutes. Dolby Digital. Related news. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content.
Edit page. Hollywood Icons, Then and Now. See the gallery. And my main advice to any aspiring show creators for finding good characters is to write what you know and to look at your real life. To try to create something of consistent quality over the duration of 20 episodes all being simultaneously produced, written, directed, designed and voiced, all on top of each other. Contact us at letters time. Creator and executive producer Alex Hirsch animates himself in the style of his "Gravity Falls" characters.
By Joseph C. We caught up with Hirsch to talk about all things Gravity Falls. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber?
Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. The premise of "Gravity Falls" is pretty simple: A pair of twelve-year-old twins gets shipped off to their great-uncle to experience a summer of fresh air in small-town Oregon. Naturally, staying with an old curmudgeon who runs a tourist trap and regularly commits crimes tends to spice things up a bit — as, too, do the multiple encounters with the fantastical and paranormal.
Yet despite their lives being put in danger and Stan constantly making the pair do extra-legal things for him, one strange thing remains missing: Neither Dipper nor Mabel seem to ever get homesick during their whole summer. But beyond that, there is never any attempt by either twin to get in contact with their parents. One would think that their great-uncle's antics or their brushes with death might inspire either Mabel or Dipper to call, write, or even allude to the existence of parents who may miss them if they die or who may know more about their mysterious summer caretaker than they can figure out alone.
Maybe they're the most independent kids ever, but the situation should seem a bit odd to older viewers, especially those who have children themselves. Right after Mabel and Dipper begin to quarrel over their shared attic bedroom in the episode "Carpet Diem," Soos finds a new room hidden in the Mystery Shack that Dipper wants to move into.
However, as the twins argue, the static charge built up from stepping on their rug causes them to swap bodies. Stuck in Mabel's body just before her friends come over for a sleepover, Dipper is carried off into the twins' attic bedroom and locked in for girly fun which, for him, is torture. Mabel, missing out, looks on through the keyhole — only to be found by Grunkle Stan. Fearing that Dipper has reached "that creepy age where [he] spies on girls," Stan decides that there is no better time than the present to sit his great-nephew down for a serious talk.
Slapping down a book titled "Why Am I Sweaty," Stan launches into the full spiel about the birds and the bees. While this may be one of the only "caretaker-type" decisions that Stan makes over the summer, the fact that it's actually Mabel hearing this talk makes the awkwardness tangible. Not only does she get an unasked-for low-down on why Dipper is so sweaty and bound to get even sweatier with age , this incident likely means that Dipper, the one who actually needs it, won't get to hear this talk.
Hopefully he figures it out. After Dipper finds schematics for a hiding place written in the journal in invisible ink, he recruits Soos, Mabel, and Wendy to explore the location in "Into the Bunker. After finding out that a hatch leads to a barren room covered in strange runes and glyphs, Soos remarks that the room is pretty creepy.
Without missing a beat, Mabel replies, "Not as creepy as Dipper's internet history" and slaps him on the back. While it's true that Dipper is only 12 years old, a constant facet of his personality throughout "Gravity Falls" is his desire to grow up more quickly than he physically can.
One of the key reasons he wants this? Being able to have a relationship with the much older Wendy. Considering his infatuation with an older woman and the sweaty hormones racing through his body, the question of what exactly Dipper has been searching on the internet is one scary mystery best left unsolved. While Gravity Falls' resident rich girl Pacifica Northwest makes several appearances throughout the series, it isn't until the episode "Northwest Mansion Noir" that Pacifica's home life is examined in any depth.
In the episode, the Northwests are preparing for a lavish party at their giant estate. The only problem is a bothersome ghost, so they recruit Dipper to eliminate it before their guests arrive.
Eventually, the ghost makes clear that the Northwests are deservedly cursed because of past selfishness and deception, and Dipper finds out that Pacifica lied to him so her family could continue living as rich elitists while sidestepping the consequences of their actions. Hurt and betrayed, Dipper confronts Pacifica and her parents; Pacifica apologizes, only to be sternly reprimanded by her parents. But they don't use words to do so.
Instead, they ring a small bell, and Pacifica cowers in silence. While it is unclear what sort of punishment the bell signifies, the end result is plain as day: Pacifica is terrified of disobeying her parents.
0コメント