This past Monday, my favorite cartoon aired it's final episode. Alex Hirsch's Disney Channel mystery show, "Gravity Falls," concluded with an hour long special, called "Weirdmageddon part 3." In this episode, the Pines family puts an end to an evil dream demon's plans, resulting in saving the world from the apocalypse. While I don't want to spoil too much about the episode, I wanted to discuss one part of it with very striking animation. During a dream sequence in the episode, the dream demon, known as Bill Cipher meets his misfortune, which leads to him morphing into a bunch of strange shapes and figures. These transformations look smooth, as well as very high budget, especially for a hand-drawn cartoon. If you watch around 2:16, you'll see the sequence:
If you're a fan of the show, but you have yet to watch the finale, then I suggest you do not watch this clip, for there are heavy spoilers.
This little sequence gives me so much hope for the future of hand-drawn animation. Many cartoons are done digitally now, which is great, because those cartoons look great too, but they don't always capture that same essence that can be found in hand-drawn. Hopefully sequences like this will keep making animators continue to use it in their future projects.
This week, one of my animation-loving friends sent me a clip from Craig McCraken's Disney channel show, "Wonder over Yonder." The clip featured a character flipping through channels, and finding a program titled as, "The Mystery Kids' Mysteries." Here is the clip below:
What I love about this clip is how it is a cute little nod to both past as well as present animators. The program shows a spoof hyrbid of 60s classic, "The Jetsons," and my personal favorite current cartoon, "Gravity Falls." Gravity Falls creator, Alex Hirsch, as well as other gf voice actors featured in the spoof as alien-like caricatures of their respective characters.
This clip really sticks out to me, because as a lover of McCraken's past cartoons, (The Powerpuff Girls, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends) I find it sweet that he is showing his support to younger show creators, such as Hirsch, who most likely looked up to him growing up. The animation community is full of tight-knit friends, and it's interesting when you look at all of the names that appear in the different shows and movies we watch.
Because I absolutely adore Disney's Gravity Falls, my first post is about the opening sequence to the show, as seen here.
Series showrunner Alex Hirsch gives us just enough visual exposition and foreshadowing in the 40-second intro to pull viewers in, which is accompanied musically by Brad Breeck's "Made Me Realize". It's a mish-mash of sights and such from the bizarre town of Gravity Falls, which protagonists Dipper and Mabel have to live through with their strange Uncle Stan. The opening is crisp, to the point, and well-designed, showing off the show's weird sense of... well, just about everything. It's a feat of design of some sort, that's for sure.
