Chris Diggins – Gravity Falls
A series finale is a difficult thing to pull off. You have to wrap up all the plot lines, give each character a satisfying send-off, and bring all the ideas and themes of your work together for one last hurrah. Ideally, an ending should be an event, a grand spectacle that leaves all your fans feeling fulfilled. Of course, that’s a high bar to achieve, and a show can hardly be blamed for not hitting every mark perfectly. But if the first part of its three part finale is anything to go on, Gravity Falls is going to vault right over that bar with ease.
(Okay, so we don’t know that this is the finale, since Disney is being characteristically tight-lipped about their plans for the show. But it’s hard to imagine coming back from this plot, so let’s assume that it is.)
If you haven’t heard of it before now, Gravity Falls is an animated show by Disney about a pair of twins, Dipper and Mabel Pines (Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal) whose parents send them to spend the summer with their eccentric Great Uncle (Or “Grunkle”) Stan (show creator Alex Hirsch) in the small Oregon town of Gravity Falls. While there, Dipper finds a mysterious journal that talks about the weird and supernatural occurrences around the town, and quickly discovers how accurate it is. So he and Mabel, along with Stan’s employees Soos Ramirez (Hirsch again) and Wendy Corduroy (Linda Cardellini) set out to uncover the secrets at the heart of Gravity Falls.
If you’re turned off by the idea of watching an animated show on Disney, please don’t be. Gravity Falls is designed to be kid-friendly, yes, but it’s clearly meant to be enjoyed by everyone. The humor is sharp and witty and comes out at lightning pace, and it’s often more nuanced in construction than you would expect from a Disney cartoon. In fact, it’s able to use humor to both improve the flow of the story and as a precision tool to heighten or undercut emotional moments and make them more impactful, and it does these things more skillfully than most other shows can manage. Besides that, the character work is utterly fantastic. It achieves that rare thing of a plot centered around a big mystery and its subsequent reveal that manages to be completely satisfying through its focus on characters and their relationships rather than pure plot.
But beyond the continued quality in those aspects, what’s making this finale in particular so special? Well, there’s a character in the show called Bill Cipher (Hirsch yet again), a chipper yet terrifying demon who just so happens to look like a pyramid with a single eye. He’s been in the shadows for most of the show, only occasionally popping in to make his presence felt, but whenever he does things get a little bit weird. In his past brief appearances, he’s done things like remove all of a passing deer’s teeth and hand them to a child, and summon a screaming disembodied head whose flesh faded away layer by layer. It never quite leaves the bounds of what’s acceptable to show to kids, but these sequences are intense and kind of disturbing in ways you can never predict, and they represent the most inventive bits of animation in the entire show.
As you might expect, Bill is the show’s main villain, and now that it’s time for the finale his plans have come to fruition. And what plans they turned out to be. Gravity Falls has exploded into what the show (and Bill himself) is calling a “Weirdmageddon,” a constant assault of the intensity and unsettling imagery that Bill once provided in small doses. The animators are clearly skirting the line of what they can do as much as possible, providing a cavalcade of sequences that may not be full-blown horror, but are certainly so much more than you expect to see when you sit down to watch Gravity Falls. It’s a beautiful sight to behold, and one that is well worth catching up on the show to witness. Thanks to Disney’s erratic scheduling, you have plenty of time before the last two parts of the series finale air, and you’d be doing yourself a favor by watching this smart, hilarious, and often touching little show.
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