Endings are scary and foreign. They split you up emotionally and put you in a place where you don't know what's going to happen next. But with every end of the world, there is a new world that follows.
Alex Hirsch
I never doubted that if I applied myself and tried to learn that I would good at it. I've had a lot of lucky turns, no doubt. But it's actually been a fairly direct line from control-freak, cartoon-obsessed kindergartner to control-freak, cartoon-obsessed executive producer.
One thing that's a lot harder to put into stories than you'd think is the idea of a traditional monster, because monsters with a capital 'M' don't inherently lend themselves to a story about your character. Unless one of your characters is themselves the monster, simply having a monster leads to a chase or a hunt.
I watched the classics as a kid, and I could tell that Bugs Bunny in drag was a cartoon and a joke. It didn't make me start dressing in drag.
You don't have to sugar coat things for kids. If you make something for them with intelligence they will show that intelligence in ways that will sometimes shock you.
I remember spending one summer being utterly obsessed with trying to get the legendary unreachable 'Ice Key' from 'Banjo-Kazooie.'
With shows like 'The X-Files' or 'Eerie, Indiana' - even though they would have comedic moments, even though they would have character moments - there was a sincerity about magic.
When you write scripts, it begins to feel like you're living in them.
With the finale episode of 'Gravity Falls' our job as storytellers is to finish all the things we've started.
I think the key as a creator is to just trust your own intuition, and follow your passion and trust that if you make something you love, an audience who loves it will find it.
Gravity Falls' has so much inspiration that comes from 'Twin Peaks,' the idea of Agent Cooper being the one to drive Dipper and Mabel home made me feel like, yeah, they're going to be all right.
Gravity Falls' was a labor of love, but like all labor it could be painful at times.
I remember as a kid being scared of the things that go bump in the night, but I was way more scared of adults.
I always designed 'Gravity Falls' to be a finite series about one epic summer-a series with a beginning, middle, and end.
To see where I've stolen all my ideas from, look no further than the comics at your local comic shop!
While everyone was out playing dodgeball, I was lying on the blacktop waiting for a UFO to take me out of elementary school.
Gravity Falls' is a riddle wrapped in an enigma tucked in a mystery deep-fried in a conundrum slathered in hickory-smoked puzzle sauce.
A lot of the fun of 'Gravity Falls' comes from the secrecy surrounding the plot. We want fans to be able to guess and speculate, to be surprised by twists and be engaged when they get things right.
Yeah, my first love was 'The Simpsons,' but in terms of movies and stuff, I loved 'Back To The Future,' I loved 'Jurassic Park,' I loved 'The Truman Show.'
Sometimes a sincere moment is the most surprising thing you can write.
As a kid, I was obsessed with 'Calvin and Hobbes' and 'Bone,' and I'm certain that I've unconsciously ripped off ideas from both, wholesale.
I spent many years of my childhood pondering the great mysteries like, 'Are aliens real?' and 'Why won't girls talk to me?'
It's always fun to write the little bit of TV that the characters watch in 'Gravity Falls,' because it's a perfect place to poke fun at the media.
The puberty train came late to the station for me. I was the shortest kid in my sixth-grade class - they made me pose for the yearbook with the tallest kid for comedic contrast.
Gravity Falls' didn't just appear overnight - every spooky cave and moss covered tree was created by a team of brilliant artists.
When I was 15 I did birdcalls on the David Letterman show, but I have since burned all video evidence of this.
Gravity Falls' normally follows very particular rules: we start out in reality close to the world as we know it, usually one magical element presents itself, and then it's essentially vanished or hidden back to where it came from by the end of the 20 minutes.
It's weird because we live in this age of reboots. Everything is getting rebooted: 'The X-Files,' 'Twin Peaks.' We have shows like 'Gravity Falls' that were inspired by these shows, that are now ending and being followed up by reboots of the shows that inspired them.
I can speak to my experience and say that CalArts worked out very well for me. After CalArts, I went to Cartoon Network, and then came to Disney.
We passed a sign for Boring, Oregon. We never went there, but I was positively enchanted with the idea that there was a town called Boring. 'Gravity Falls' is partially from what I imagine Boring might be like. Or maybe the opposite of Boring, Oregon, would be 'Gravity Falls.'
I loved 'The X-Files.'
I tended toward animated material that wasn't just for kids. I could tell as a kid watching those shows that I loved the jokes that I got but I also loved the jokes I didn't get because I felt that I was hanging out with a smarter, cooler audience.
When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages.
As long as I can recall I've always wanted to make cartoons.
I think good kids TV has got to have layers. It has to have compelling characters that everyone loves, but you can't dumb it down.
One day I'd love to release a coffee table book of all the crazy notes I got from Disney Channel's S&P and legal department.
My mom is always right.
I personally went canvassing door to door in a local race when I was in high school and thought it was kind of hilarious how worked up people got over such small stakes elections.
There are so many shows that go on endlessly until they lose their original spark, or mysteries that are cancelled before they ever get a chance to payoff.
I was raised in the '90s. I love 'Seinfeld.'
The fact that childhood ends is exactly what makes it so precious - and why you should cherish it while it lasts.
I was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster, I would look through these books in the library and dream about visiting Loch Ness one day… That stuff was really kind of what I loved as a kid.
Not a lot of people get to say, 'I'm a cartoon character.'
When me and my sister were growing up, we just had very different personalities. I was sort of analytical and took myself too seriously, and she was sort of goofy and nuts and full of love - too much love, she had a crush on a different guy every week.
A lot of kid characters you see on TV are sassy, and snarky, and think they're just the coolest kids in the world, and are mean spirited.
When you're drawing from observation and experience, whether you intend to or not, you'll create a more relatable cartoon.
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.
When I was a kid, back in the days before cell phone cameras, I had disposable cameras I took a lot of pictures with and I just remember something always went wrong.
When I was about 7 years old, I built a leprechaun trap out of a cardboard box, a biscuit tin and some toilet paper tubes.
The more a character wants and the less a character has the ability to get what they want, the more you have an endless fuel for storytelling in comedy.
