Alex Hirsch - Gravity Falls

Disney Channel's Gravity Falls has, since Thought Bubble, become one of my favourite animated shows, due to its bizarre aesthetic and relatable, flawed and grounded characters.
I don't really watch tv shows because I normally don't have the time, but this series is one that I've consciously made time for, as I genuinely feel its been changing how I think about illustration and what my place is in this world as a storyteller.
It's one of those shows like Adventure Time that, to an outsider, appears silly and fantastical, but really at the heart of it there are some real emotionally complex issues being dealt with in a medium that a younger audience can understand and relate to. The show also toes the line between being goofy Halloween spooky, and genuinely scary.


The show focuses on twins Mabel and Dipper Pines, and presents both of them as latching on points for the audience, as they are flawed but repeatedly learn from their mistakes. The absence of a singular main character in favour of having both a boy and a girl at the forefront is great, the issues of childhood and the transition to adolescence are things every boy or girl goes through, and Gravity Falls does well to incorporate both viewpoints and the importance of not alienating others because of their sex, as most people tend to do once hormones kick in and boys and girls start seeing each other much differently.
The show goes from these realistic interpretations of growing up and themes like the importance of mutual respect for others, realising your own shortcomings rather than blaming everyone else, and the importance of understanding views you don't yourself have, to completely mad cosmic level conceptual theories of evil in the universe with villains like the demon trans-dimensional triangle Bill Cipher, pictured above. This insane contrast of content helps to ground the show in a way, as the characters are all doing next level out of this world stuff, but the narrative uses it in a way to relate to normal people with normal problems.
This level of fictional escapism is something I really love in storytelling, and its something I'd like to start incorporating into my own work, as I'd love to start combining writing with illustration to make work that can use comedy and bizarre elements to communicate a message that's a lot more simple, and human.