Director’s commentaries are a great way to hear directly from screenwriters, producers and actors about their experiences of working on shows. Personally, I get the greatest enjoyment from hearing from writers.
Gravity Falls (Disney, 2012-2016) is probably the greatest animated show of the 2010s. Like the modern-day Avatar, it very casually takes programming that is accessible for children and treats it with the respect, care and intrigue of any show for adults.
If you’ve never seen it, it follows twins Dipper and Mabel Pines as they spend a summer in the woods staying at their Great Uncle (“Grunkle”) Stan’s tourist trap in the woods, and they gradually learn of all the supernatural beings, elements and forces at play within the sleepy town of Gravity Falls.
These include talking lawn gnomes, secret societies, mermen, shapeshifters, underground bunkers, a president frozen in peanut brittle, and a chaotic demonic triangle.
What’s great about Gravity Falls is that its entire 40-episode commentary track is available for free on Apple Podcasts. Every episode features its creator, Alex Hirsch, and a rotating track of “the talent”, including Kristen Schall, Jason Ritter, and many of the writers.
Some of the most interesting tidbits I’ve learned from the show include just how much time the writers put into a lot of the episodes. Hirsch frequently talks about how he and the executive producers often spent many nights staying up, at the office, until about 5am to crack story beats that seem self-evident in retrospect but understandably very difficult to figure out at the time.
I also learned about how Hirsch views stories. He states during the commentary that the smallest unit of story, in his opinion, features a character who is forced to make a choice by the end of the story. For a while I took this as gospel before reading that there were different types of stories besides character-focused ones, but echoes of this can be seen in films like Do The Right Thing, where Mookie’s choice to begin the riot with the trash can acts as the tipping point of the movie, and everything before that is building up the conflict he feels between the two sides of him.
Hirsch also describes in great detail the battles he had to undergo with the Disney censorship board, and how he would occasionally call for reanimation to be done at great expense to get certain scenes as good as they looked in the storyboard. One of the biggest surprises I got was just how unplanned the show seemed to be backstage compared to what it looks like in its final product.
Listen to the Gravity Falls director’s commentaries here: Behind the Scenes of Gravity Falls.