Mic Graves makes incompatible kinds of animation live together and keeps the comedy clear. We rate his direction of The Amazing World of Gumball highly, though its first season needs patience.
Fi1m perspective
A blue cat and his goldfish brother share a photographed suburb with neighbours who seem to belong in several different programmes. In The Amazing World of Gumball (2011), Mic Graves helps turn that mismatch into fast, unusually clever comedy. Hand-drawn characters, three-dimensional models, puppets and cut-outs occupy the same streets without the directing making a fuss about it. We laughed at the mismatched neighbours sharing a street, because each is allowed to treat the others as perfectly normal.
Graves came to this through animation work that included directing The Canterbury Tales: Knight's Tale (1999) and serving as creative director on Monkey Dust (2003). With Gumball, the sustained work of a series director became central to his career. Ben Bocquelet created the programme, and Antoine Perez shares the directing credit; its success should not be handed to Graves alone. Graves also wrote for the series and voiced Banana Joe, so his contribution to the comedy extended beyond deciding how things should look.
The directing achievement is clearest once the novelty has worn off. After an episode or two, we stop mentally sorting the characters by how they were made and accept that they belong together. That leaves the series free to keep finding jokes in their differences across six seasons, rather than spending every episode introducing its own cleverness. The first season is the roughest, and we would not pretend that the idea arrives fully settled. We would stay with it past that uncertain start.
Elliott from Earth (2021), which Graves co-created and supervised as director, takes a different approach with hand-painted backgrounds and a science-fiction story that develops across episodes. Writer and editor Tony Hull is among his collaborators there, alongside co-creator Guillaume Cassuto. We would still start with Gumball, where his knack for making incompatible characters look comfortable together has six seasons in which to develop. Allow for the first season before deciding whether this is your sort of suburb.
Biography
Mic Graves is an English animator, director, writer, producer and voice actor. He is best known as the series director of the Cartoon Network animated series The Amazing World of Gumball (2011–2019), on which he also served as writer, executive producer and voice actor, including the role of Banana Joe.
Graves began his career at Studio AKA, working on commercials and shorts such as The Canterbury Tales (1998). He later contributed to The Big Knights (1999–2000) as assistant art director and served as creative director on Monkey Dust (2003–2005). He was hired by Gumball creator Ben Bocquelet for the series.
After Gumball concluded, Graves co-created and served as supervising director, writer and executive producer on the Cartoon Network series Elliott from Earth (2021). In 2026 he was announced as director and writer of an animated feature adaptation of Flat Stanley for Disney+.
