I feel like the best kids shows aren't just for kids. The best kids shows have something in it for everyone. As you grow up, you're increasingly proud to be a fan of the show, rather than getting to an age where you suddenly become embarrassed that you ever liked it because it's only for seven-year-olds.
Think about how rare it is that you exist at all. Also think about time this way: If something exists, even for a second, then forever in the future that thing “existed”, and forever in the past that thing “was going to exist”. So to even be conscious for a millisecond is a kind of immortality, but you have more than a millisecond. You have minutes. Hours. Months. A year? Years! This is a gift.
I'm a very relentless individual and have a lot more insanity coming.
As long as I could hold a pencil, I was drawing and telling stories and making jokes. I've just been lucky that no one ever stopped me, and now I can do that for a living.
In terms of creative engagement, I just love being able to produce, produce, produce. You don't always get it perfect, but it has much more of an improvisational element, and you learn.
I remember as a kid being scared of the things that go bump in the night, but I was way more scared of adults.
Once you train an audience to look for significance, they start to find it everywhere.
Gravity Falls is a show about mysteries and magic but first and foremost it's a show about characters.
A sibling is a friend for life, but they are a friend for life that you are forced to have. And like anything that you are forced to do, occasionally people will drive you crazy.
If you ask anyone in animation, how long they've been into animation, they'll pretty much always tell you that it's since they can remember, and I'm no exception.
My goal with Gravity Falls is to make people as paranoid and insane as I was as a child, and I'm delighted to see it's working!
Everyone has days where they don't get their way, where you have to go to bed early or you have too much homework to do or you can't eat the candy that you want or you miss your favorite TV show and, in those moments, you just want to tear the whole world down.
You can look at a finale as chance to make an impact or a statement, to shock people or shoot a big cannon and make a loud noise.
When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages. I would record TV commercials with SoundRecorder.exe on Windows 95 and reverse them to see if I was being subliminally influenced to watch Pokémon by Japanese spies.
Gravity Falls has transformed the children of America into an army of Dippers. I couldn't be more proud!
I try to be a man of mystery. I try to keep the various projects I'm up to as close to the vest as possible until it's time to reveal them.
Your family, even though you love them, they can get on your nerves. You spend so much time together.
The concern about what's too violent or what's too scary is something that I just completely don't let enter into my creative process. I feel like, if I spend a lot of time trying to worry about whether it will appeal to everyone and who will like it and who won't, and I try to please everyone, I'll just spread myself too thin and lose my mind.
When you're doing an animated series, you tend to pitch storyboards. You write a script and then you draw a comic version of that script and put it up on big boards, and then you pitch it to a big room of executives and writers.
There is a very specific, unique brand of rivalry that exists between twins. You're always wondering who the Alpha twin is.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with UFOs in particular, and the paranormal. I grew up in the '90s, which is when The X-Files was at its zenith.
Some people could say, "I'd like something that's super dramatic and miserable and made me cry and made me sad forever" but that's not my taste.
I've always just loved drawing and loved cartoons. Growing up, I loved Disney films, I loved The Simpsons, and I was a big fan of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes and the way that they would have weird fantasy and then down-to-earth funny character comedy.
I built a leprechaun trap that was made to look like a tiny hotel. There was a ramp where the leprechaun could walk into the hotel, see a Lego pot of gold on the other side, try to reach it, fall through a trap door, go through a tube, wind up in a biscuit tin, and be trapped. My mom, encouraging my madness, told me that the leprechaun might escape and that I needed a shot glass of whiskey down there to keep him occupied while he was in there.
The most relevant misadventure that I had, as a kid, is when I remember being pretty convinced that leprechauns were real and that I was going to catch one.
