‘Gravity’ has quirky attraction
MABEL AND Dipper Pines are really looking forward to summer vacation. Hanging around, doing nothing.
When their plans distintegrate into dust, it gets good for the rest of us in this quirky and endearing new animated Disney series.
Mabel and Dipper are tweens and twins who discover to their chagrin that they will be summering with Great-Uncle Stan in Gravity Falls, Ore.
They’ll also be working in his shoddy tourist trap, a quasimuseum that “Grunkle Stan” sees solely as a means to finesse cash from unsuspecting people with bad shorts and cameras around their necks.
The real story begins when Mabel (voiced by Kristen Schaal) and Dipper (voiced by Jason Ritter) notice actual weird doings.
They find a dusty old book that suggests the place is inhabited by odd critters, which Mabel fantasizes will include vampires.
Mabel is hunting for her first boyfriend, you see, and being an ultimate consumer of tween literature, she thinks nothing could be cooler than landing a vampire.
That first boyfriend turns out to be something else, though, as do a number of the discoveries she and Dipper make.
So we’ve got romance, adventure and tween/teen pop culture humor, all assembled by 26-yearold Alex Hirsch, who based “Gravity Falls” partly on his own experiences.
Whomever he based Mabel on, that’s the first person you’d want to meet.