- Starring
- Jason Ritter, Alex Hirsch, Kristen Schaal
- Rating
- TV-Y7
- Genre
- Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy
- Release date
- June 29, 2012
- Where to watch
- Disney+
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Gravity Falls is a Disney cartoon series that follows the adventures of Dipper and Mabel Pines, twin siblings who are sent to spend the summer with their great-uncle Stan in the mysterious town of Gravity Falls, Oregon. They quickly discover that the town is filled with supernatural occurrences and bizarre creatures. Together, they explore the town’s secrets, unraveling mysteries with the help of a journal Dipper finds that contains information about the strange phenomena they encounter.
Gravity Falls Review
Refreshingly light on the sugary lessons like the value of friendship, etc., that flood most modern children’s, though not completely without them, Gravity Falls is a mostly refreshing goofball comedy cartoon series. Its fun characters and light, well-meaning adventures fall somewhere between car-driving grizzly bear ridiculous and evil gremlin-troll terrorizing…that is until he realizes that his worst nightmare is becoming his father, and he runs off.
PARENTAL NOTES
Important Information for Parents
Our Parental Notes flag the material parents may want to know about before pressing play, including profanity, blasphemy, adult content, extreme violence, frightening intensity, hyper-stimulating sequences, and other family-content concerns.
WOKE REPORT
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
74%?
I’m surprised. It never was a show ti watch, especially children.
Gravity falls is a fine show, probably not good for younger kids but I’d say 8-9+ is good. The only woke things I can think of I think we’re covered in this review, but I will say that the girl with the deep voice is NOT trans and her deep voice and big figure is played only for laughs (one episode Grunkle Stan asks her if she’s got a cold bc of her voice, mistaking it’s deepness for sickness). Also I think that Wendy saying “Boys are the worst” isn’t supposed to be the creators actively shitting on men (though knowing Alex hirsh, the shows creator, I wouldn’t exactly tly hold it past him) but rather it’s supposed to be a teenage girl venting her own personal frustrations, which is something teenage girls due in real life without meaning anything by it. In high school I remember hearing multiple girls and boys saying “I hate boys/ girls!” Or “boys/girls suck” after a breakup or in casual conversation. The occult in this show is shown to be evil and have consequences (literally the triangle demon summoned by one of the characters is summoned for selfish evil reasons and the demon himself is shown to be incredibly evil). Really the only woke things I can think of all the (possibly) gay cops, though it’s played for laughs and ridicule similar to how bugs bunny dressing as a woman was played for laughs in looney tunes cartoons. The other woke thing with Soos’ dad is only one episode and not really mentioned ever again and it doesn’t exactly totally shit on fathers, bc Soos’ finds a father figure in Grunkle Stan, whom he respects and treats like a dad
I didn’t watch Gravity Falls. Sometime around 2007-08, either I aged out of the target audience or the culture had changed, because that’s when I determined that Disney Channel’s television programming (and Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon) had become too obnoxious for me to tolerate, even though it was popular for everyone else.
I do remember standing in the same room while the aforementioned “class warfare” episode was running. Dipper and Mabel had challenged a spoiled rich girl (who otherwise wasn’t doing anything wrong) to a game of mini-golf and were relying on tiny gremlins living inside the statues to cheat because the other girl was genuinely better at the game. I think there used to be a time when Disney’s narrative regarding cheating at sports was “if the bad guy cheats, you just have to be better to prove you can win without cheating”. The idea that the protagonists are allowed to cheat with impunity for no other reason than “we’re the heroes, we’re entitled to winning and we can’t let the other kid win” really bothers me a lot. If the good guys can’t win fairly, then at least show me that you can lose with grace and that it’s not the end of the world. (Though I think I remember a few Disney movies where the protagonists used things like flying rubber or invisibility potions to cheat at college sports because the alternative would be the shuttering of the college). It may not be fully woke, but it demonstrates a general lack of integrity.
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