It still surprises me at how few people have seen Freak of the Week, and I love sharing it with friends because of the inevitable, “How the hell have I never seen this?” look of awe drawn out on their face.

And man, it really is gorgeous.

Directed by Juanjo Guarnido, it took the team about a year of hard work to hammer out this bloody masterpiece (which you can learn about in his video here) using a combination of 3D animation with the power of college interns  skill of a team of artists to painstakingly re-draw the 3D elements they wanted in 2D frame-by-frame, not to mention the post processing and… everything else.

 Even though it came out in 2014, it doesn’t seem to have ever garnered the attention it truly deserves.

I really wanna drive this point home, so to give you an idea, Ghost by Mystery Skulls, animated by MysteryBen27 has 18,147,263 views.   Freak of the Week has only 2,271,121 views at the time I’m writing this.  That’s fucking depressing for something so … phenomenal.  I want more of this, and hell, maybe you do too.  But we’re not going to see anymore simply because the right people haven’t seen it.  In fact, it failed to reach a respectable level of Internet Popularity®, Juanjo himself even described it in the comments section as having ruined him because of how little attention it got.  

So if you’re reading this and you’ve got some connections with a TV network or something, consider pulling some strings to get this video spoon-fed to the masses, because people ought to see this.  I’m sure Juanjo would be all too happy to oblige.  And hell, if you wanna buy the art book, you can get the link here for about $50.

Now, maybe you recognize the former Disney animator Juanjo Guarnido for his other work: Blacksad.

Which is a comic set in the late 1950′s about a hardboiled private investigator published originally by Dark Horse Comics that does… y’know, the …

… noir investigator …

… aloof ladies man…

… badass …

… detective story thing.

That I haven’t yet read but I TOTALLY NEED TO.  

Look,

I guess I’m bringing up Freak of the Week because I was reading the comment section and, man, it kinda got me down.  

“Hey man that’s not bad!”

“It’s not that great!”

“No it’s good man!”

“Maybe though, add some shading around where the head shadows the neck.”

“Make sure you it’s obvious where the light source is coming from.”

“It will help give the drawing more volume and depth.”

Boku dake ga inai Machi, opening theme, episode 1 vs episode 11

People from all over the states start coming to see the statue

Bill Cipher statue becomes a fixure of Oregon tourism

Small kiosk opens up to capitalize on the business of the Bill Cipher tourists

More tourist attractions open near by, with more food courts and restaurants to follow

People start building a small neighborhood for the attractions’ owners to live in

Neighborhood grows, soon there’s a fire department, a library, children begin being born in the region

The area becomes a small town

This guy would survive a horror movie.

Every single time this comes up on my dash it gets funnier. Like I just fell of of my bed from laughing so hard

He hit him with a lamp.

I love his freedom pants.

Oh I’d definitely agree with you there.

Bill, as a whole, can be seen as a symbol. Go with me on this. For a very long post that spiraled out of control.

There are a lot of parallels you can pull between Bill’s plans and Mabeland: 

He’s chaotic. He doesn’t care about responsibility, or loyalty, or anything difficult. He’s fun incarnate. Terrifying fun, but fun.

Bill’s defeat coincides with the end of the summer, when the twins fully accept growing up. You could draw the parallel that defeating Bill means defeating holding onto your childhood. Which is true, in some ways.

But then there’s the fact that it’s Stan who defeats Bill in the end, not the kids.

Does he have a childhood to grow out of? I mean, you can say that he has been holding onto it for a long time

But at the same time he gave it up.

First he is forced to grow up way too fast, living on his own, feeling betrayed.

And when he does see his brother again, he basically tells him he never wants to see him again. 

He tries, 30 years to bring him back, bitter with no family. But there is some hope for him. Soos

and the kids, of course.

When he finally succeeds? Ford punches him in the face, and they avoid each other basically the rest of the series. 

The fact is, we (and they too, sort of) forget about all this hate they have built up until that one line: 

One, tiny thing like that, just reminds Stan of all this, of all the work he’s put into this and how Ford doesn’t even care and how he still has the audacity to look down on him. So they fight again. And almost destroy the universe. 

It’s not until they’re both caught by Bill and watch the kids working together do they realize that they’ve both messed up their relationship. 

But here’s the interesting thing: what does Stan say, in regards to Mabel and Dipper?

And then they make up. And that’s how they defeat Bill. 

Hence the paddleball. 

Hence them going on the boat trip. 

They’re reclaiming their own childhood.

But doesn’t that go against the whole message here, that defeating Bill means defeating your childhood? 

I’d say there are two extremes in the show: Bill who grew old and never grew up, never changed, and the Stans who grew old and completely grew up, and changed a lot. In the end, it’s a balance between the two that wins out. Dipper and Mabel learn to grow up, but not at the expense of each other. 

And Stan and Ford learn that too. 

It’s too easy to say Gravity Falls is a series about putting your childhood behind you; about realizing you have to grow up and become an adult. Because it’s not. It’s a series about growing up, yes, but not growing out of who you are. 

It’s about taking the best things from your childhood and letting them grow, realizing and changing as you get older. 

Some selects from the final episode. 

Hard to believe it’s actually over. What a crazy experience! I’m not just talking about the work I did but I met some of my dearest friends on that crew. 

I’m not good at writing these kind of things so I’ll just get to it. 

Thank you Alex for giving this newbie a chance to prove herself, thank you Braly for the support from the very beginning, thank you Cory for letting me ask a lot of dumb questions, thank you Stephen for the patience while I learned how to do my job, and a big THANK YOU to the rest of the crew for challenging me and making Gravity Falls one hell of a production to work on.