Sheer delight. The pitch goes something like Simpsons/Futurama meets Twin Peaks and X-Files (but I'm pretty confident way sweeter-hearted than any of those), somehow none of which are deep in my own pitch but of course all have such an enormous pop cultural footprint that it almost doesn't matter. Twelve year old twins Dipper and Mabel are sent to spend the summer with their great uncle Stan in the strangely weirdness-prone town of Gravity Falls, Oregon and over two seasons encounter gnomes, sea monsters, dinosaurs, a haunted convenience store, video game characters come to life, tribal mini-golf balls, a gremloblin, some very annoying unicorns, a group of very manly manotaurs, their enemy the multibear, the manipulative child psychic Little Gideon, the evil top hat-wearing triangle being from another dimension Bill Cipher, and much else as the town's deeper mysteries are gradually revealed.
Jason Ritter is perfectly fine - charming, even - as Dipper, but Kristen Schaal, who makes everything that she's in better anyway, is perfect as the ever enthusiastic Mabel (hard to overstate how great she is here), and the animation works handily with both of their voices to bring them to life, while the writing works hard to show the strength of the bond between them. There's also their Grunkle Stan, handyman Soos (both voiced by showrunner Alex Hirsch) and older teen crush Wendy (who is indeed basically the coolest girl ever - Linda Cardellini), plus an array of others who zoom in and out, including the unmistakeable tones of Nick Offerman as a federal agent who comes in to investigate the strange happenings.
Season 1 races along, doing both monsters and character building, and then season 2 really stretches - noticeably confidently, across the whole season - into some extended storytelling as it lays out just what is going on in Gravity Falls and how those events relate to our main characters and the host of other town eccentrics in their orbit. Colourful, smart, charming, and full of call-backs, subtle gags, laugh out loud jokes of all kinds, while also getting the poignancy of the 'summer on the verge of being official teenagers as close-knit siblings face the mysterious wider world' just right; all round great.
Jason Ritter is perfectly fine - charming, even - as Dipper, but Kristen Schaal, who makes everything that she's in better anyway, is perfect as the ever enthusiastic Mabel (hard to overstate how great she is here), and the animation works handily with both of their voices to bring them to life, while the writing works hard to show the strength of the bond between them. There's also their Grunkle Stan, handyman Soos (both voiced by showrunner Alex Hirsch) and older teen crush Wendy (who is indeed basically the coolest girl ever - Linda Cardellini), plus an array of others who zoom in and out, including the unmistakeable tones of Nick Offerman as a federal agent who comes in to investigate the strange happenings.
Season 1 races along, doing both monsters and character building, and then season 2 really stretches - noticeably confidently, across the whole season - into some extended storytelling as it lays out just what is going on in Gravity Falls and how those events relate to our main characters and the host of other town eccentrics in their orbit. Colourful, smart, charming, and full of call-backs, subtle gags, laugh out loud jokes of all kinds, while also getting the poignancy of the 'summer on the verge of being official teenagers as close-knit siblings face the mysterious wider world' just right; all round great.
