AWN Caught up with the cast and crew at San Diego Comic-Con to talk about their chaotic and always fun new series, centered on a cat and his adopted goldfish brother, that mixes live-action, CGI, stop-motion and 2D, launching today in the U.S. on Hulu and Disney+.
The Amazing World of Gumball, an animated sitcom created and directed by Ben Bocquelet, entertained Cartoon Network viewers for eight years with wild multi-media visuals as chaotic as its eclectic characters. The series revolved around the life of a 12-year-old cat named Gumball Watterson and his frequent shenanigans in the fictional city of Elmore, California, accompanied by his adopted goldfish brother and best friend Darwin. Made up of traditional animation, puppetry, CGI, stop-motion, Flash animation, and live-action, The Amazing World of Gumball proved that consistently good storytelling could exist in an inconsistent world.
Building on the success of that show is the all-new The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball, produced by Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe, releasing today, July 28, on Hulu and Disney+ in the U.S., later this year in various international territories on Cartoon Network and HBO Max. As we head back to Elmore, reality bends and family life gets weird. Gumball pulls his brother Darwin, pink sister bunny Anais and the whole town into adventures - from fighting evil fast food to dealing with an AI crushing on his mom. The show's so wild, it needed a new name.
Check out the trailer:
“I love the ability to push things in Gumball,” says executive producer and series director Matt Layzell in an interview with AWN at San Diego Comic Con following the team’s Gumball panel. “Ben set up just a beautiful world in which you can just kind of go crazy and try things and try to walk that line. I think that’s what has always attracted me to the show.”
Bocquelet adds, “The secret ingredient is pain.”
Layzell was also, as Bocquelet puts it, a “Gumball baby,” who worked as a young animator on the original series.
“We’ve been grooming him to take over from a young age,” jokes Bocquelet.
The ability to let loose creatively is what attracted Erik Fountain to join the Gumball team for the new show. Fountain had been working on Gravity Falls during Gumball’s original run, as well as Adventure Time and Craig of the Creek.
“This show has no business looking as good and dynamic as it does,” says Fountain, who serves as executive producer and series director alongside Layzell. “I joined out of pure curiosity. I worked on other really good shows, but all the characters were made the same way. So, it was huge, the opportunity to work on Gumball and go into Willy Wonka’s. It was amazing.”
Fittingly enough, Gumball’s origins stem from Bocquelet’s inability to follow rules.
“I worked in commercials for a while, very unsuccessfully,” explains Bocquelet. “Turns out, I’m not very good at doing what people want. I can only do whatever I want. So, I ended up with this myriad of characters with all sorts of styles from commercial pitches and no one wanted them. When I left commercials to join Cartoon Network as sort of an animation Swiss Army knife to help people pitch their projects, they asked me if I had any ideas. I opened my old drawers and found all those characters that I’d already been paid to do and sold them again the second time.”
But this time around, the characters weren’t partnered with products but fused into a family comedy.
“Again, I started digging through my drawers for shameful stories from my family and made money out of that,” shares Bocquelet with a laugh.
And, for the new series, Bocquelet says there was no problem coming up with new stories and “new ways to upset lawyers.”
“We never stopped having good ideas for Gumball,” notes Bocquelet, “And we got to work with a lot of new artists we admire. We’re lucky that Gumball is a show where we can include anyone with any animation style or illustrative style and we got to work with some really cool people this year.”
One of those cool people is acclaimed, Berlin-based 3D animator and illustrator Jack Sachs, who created the new logo and title sequence for the series.
“We can comb through our Instagrams and reach out to artists we follow and admire to shoot our shot, saying ‘Hey! Do you want to art direct a sequence?’ says Fountain. “And a lot of them are super fans like we all are, which is amazing. So, they’re always like, ‘Yes, please!’ which is really cool.”
The series’ new voice cast, including Alkaio Thiele (Gumball), Hero Hunter (Darwin) and Kinza Syed Khan (Anais) are fans too and were attracted to the “edginess” of the show.
“A show like this gives us more to play off of,” says Thiele. “Sometimes the characters can see that the other characters look different and sometimes they can’t. But the different style always makes for more interesting interactions.”
Khan adds, “I feel like it attracts everyone’s attention. Everyone loves it, people young and old.”
Layzell says the team particularly had fun working in CG animation to do some PlayStation-inspired sequences and addressing AI topics, which they hadn’t done in the original series.
“On Gumball, you’re always challenging yourself to tell the best stories,” says Layzell. “On a micro scale, you’re trying to tell the best jokes you can. And, on a macro scale, you’re trying to push the medium and new animation styles.”
But, for as much fun as it is producing a series like Gumball, the team agrees that nothing comes organically.
“It’s really hard,” says Fountain. “It’s a pain, like Ben said. But the thing about it is, for a lot of shows, there’s an acceptable threshold for comedy. But for Gumball, we found we had to keep going and keep pushing and sometimes it was a bit painful. But it doesn’t matter because the end product is really fun.”
And it’s been well worth the wait for fans and cast members alike.
“I’ve been waiting a long time,” shares Hunter. “We’ve been shooting this for two years and I’ve just been like, ‘I want to see what it looks like, already!’ But the finished product is so awesome, and it looks so nice. I can’t put it into words how excited I am to see all the episodes.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
