Amphibia, an animated Disney Channel series chronicling the adventures of 13-year-old Anne Boonchuy after she's magically transported to a land of frog people, has touched countless viewers with its layered stories of friendship and bravery amidst loss and isolation. Though it is aimed at young children and certainly captivates their attention, it is equally impactful for older viewers with its mix of nostalgia and fresh humor. It's no wonder that the creative mind behind the phenomenon. Matt Braly, previously lent his talents to one of the most acclaimed Disney Channel series ever:Â Gravity Falls.
Though Amphibia is currently in its final season, the journey from its inception has been a long and fruitful one. Before production began in 2017, creator Matt Braly had a distinct vision for that spanned three seasons. He was lucky enough to have the opportunity of seeing it through, and the creative team, cast and crew delivered on his vision with 58 fantastic episodes, 20 shorts, an Emmy Award nomination and Annie Award win. Amphibia is now a Top 3 animated cable series among Kids 6-11, with more than 165 million views on Disney Channel's YouTube, and continues to be available on Disney Channels and Disney+ around the world.
Related: The 10 Best Characters In Amphibia
Screen Rant had the honor of speaking to Braly about Amphibia's third act, and the creator dove into everything from casting his mother On Braly as Mrs. Boonchuy to finding satisfaction with the final episodes while making a point to craft story arcs for every character - large or small, amphibian or otherwise.
How does being so closely tied to Amphibia - to the point that it is your baby - affect your outlook as Act 3 comes to a close? Are you satisfied with the journey or are there things you still want to go in and tweak?
Matt Braly: As a creative, you will always want to go in and tweak things and change things forever. But I'm very happy with the show that we've made, and I'm super proud of all three seasons.
It's been a long road for me. I was looking at my very first pitch docs, and they were dated 2015. So, it's been a long time with this world and these characters, and I love them to bits. I think they've had a great run.
While working on the show, I was fortunate to meet so many wonderful and encouraging people. I’m especially grateful to Brenda Song, who voices Anne Boonchuy. When we were working on the pilot together half a decade ago, her support really made me feel like this was a job I could do.
Anne being Thai American has always been important, but we get to see that significance onscreen more than ever this season because we're on Earth. What has it been like to incorporate aspects of the culture, such as visiting the temple?
Matt Braly: It was a huge priority for me, even as early as season 1. And it's like this for anyone who is writing a show that has longform continuity: based on the way pickups work, you write season 1 while hoping with fingers crossed to get season 2. And then you write season 2 hoping, fingers crossed, to get season 3.
And I was so grateful that we made it to season 3, because I knew that in season 3, Anne was going to go to LA. She was going to not only reconnect with her parents, but also going to connect with her culture a little bit. And that was very, very exciting for me.
The Thai temple that is featured in the episode "Temple Frogs" in season 3 is actually based off the real-life Wat Thai Los Angeles. I used to go there all the time, and I actually used to take Thai lessons in the basement.
You've said in the past that this was meant to be a three-act story, but with the conditional nature of pickups, how intentional were you in driving to the conclusion? How early on did you have the ending planned, and how did you seed the hints or Easter eggs dropped along the way?
Matt Braly: I'm a meticulous, longform planner. In the sense that, even in season 1, I already sort of had the final scene of the show in my head. I was just hoping and praying that one day I'd get to execute it. That's just always been my storytelling philosophy. I think that the ending is the most important part of any story, because it's your last chance to say something meaningful about this journey and these characters.
For me, especially with a story like this that is about these three human girls who are stuck in this crazy fantasy adventure rigmarole, it was really important for me - almost morally - to get them home. I didn't want to end up in a situation where the show gets cut short, and these poor girls are still trapped in this other world. The goal was always to resolve the story in a satisfying way in three seasons, and my team has done such an amazing job paying certain things off.
We have a lot of season 1 characters and moments that return in season 3, and it gives a nice bookend to the entire experience. I'm just very excited for fans and viewers to see where this story leaves the characters.
Are there any characters you can tease that we don't already know are coming back in the next episodes?
Matt Braly: Almost everything is a spoiler at this point. There's a lot of fans who really want a curated experience where there's really nothing revealed and everything is a big surprise, so I think I will hold my tongue on that stuff.
But there are some characters returning and some moments that, to me, really bring fun continuity and bridge season 3 and season 1 in ways that I've always been hoping for. I'm so pleased to see them actualized.
Looking back then, we've gotten to see the girls grow so much in Amphibian and change for the better in many ways. And now that the Plantars have visited Earth, we've gotten to see them grow as well. But even characters like Toadie have really gotten to level up, such as in "Sasha's Angels." How important was it to have these mini-arcs for frog characters in addition to your humans?
Matt Braly: First of all, let me say I really appreciate your knowledge and insight of this stuff. Yes, it was so important for us. This show's about change, and that is the theme that extends to all the characters on the show. We wanted to make sure even the smallest characters seemed loved and got some attention, so that's why you end up with stories like "Sasha's Angels" that focuses on Toadie.
I think that, for me, the show has always been about changes; the ebb and flow of friendship, and the ebb and flow of personal growth. As you know, these three girls have been friends since childhood, and now they're all changing. What does that mean for their friendship? What does it mean for themselves personally? And for the frogs, we wanted to show that this was something they experienced as well.
All the characters kind of go through something. Nobody leaves these three seasons the same.
I know your mom voices Mrs. Boonchuy, which is the sweetest and most adorable thing. How did that decision come about, and do you feel you've grown closer to her because of that?
Matt Braly: Having my mom come and do a voice was probably one of the best experiences on the show. We cast her because we needed a bilingual, Thai-speaking and English-speaking, actor - which was surprisingly hard to come by. She was there and available, and I thought it would give some nice texture to the show if it was, in fact, my own mother.
Because a lot of the writing for her character is more or less based on her; my mom is very nuanced and specific. She's very loving, but also very firm. I thought, "Who better to communicate that nuanced character than the human herself?"
I totally was concerned about directing my mom in the booth, wondering, "Is that going to strain our relationship?" And you're absolutely right. We have never been closer. I loved working with her. She was so sweet and so excited to be there. Like, "I get to be in my son's thing!" She was a total professional and just wanted to make sure all the reads were right for what we wanted.
She really gave it her all and, for someone who has never acted a day in her life, she did an incredible job. One small anecdote is that, as we were walking to the first recording, she was holding the script and kind of practicing in her head. She turned to me and said, "Am I a strict mom? Or am I a kind mom?" I just said, "Mom, you're both." And then I realized, "Wait, you're asking me about the character!"
If I had not known she was your mother, I would not have known it was her first time at all.
Matt Braly: Amazing. I'll tell her that; she'll love that.
Every new location in Amphibia is so visually stunning, like the recently seen Proteus, and always feels different from what we've seen before while still existing in the same universe. How many worlds does Amphibia span in your mind and, when you build out a new story, what is the process of crafting that place and finding the balance?
Matt Braly: Yeah, we had a priority when it came to doing all three seasons. We wanted to make sure that, as an audience member watching a random episode, you would be able to tell what season it was based on the world design. Whether it was taking place exclusively in the small town of Wartwood in season 1, or if they were on the road or in the city of Newtopia in season 2, and then in LA obviously in season 3.
We've actually had three separate art directing teams for each of the three seasons, and that allowed us to further carve out specific identities for these seasons. When it comes to creating a new world, or a new city or a new road stop, we would always try to make sure it's not something that we've done before.
In the case of Proteus, our art team had this brilliant idea of basing the entire city around the idea that these creatures cannot see and live underground. That gave them such a wonderful starting point to build this culture.
Another thing I love is that, at the end of every season, Anne and Sasha duke it out. It's like an annual tradition. I know you won't spoil anything, but what can you say about the evolution in their friendship between the season 2 finale and what will be the series finale?
Matt Braly: Building the relationship between Anne and Sasha has been one of the more rewarding experiences on the show, in terms of writing. And I think what's so nice about it is that a lot of it comes from the nuance of the character Sasha.
This is something that I totally geek out about and love about our season 1 finale reunion. There's this crazy moment where Sasha lets go of Anne's hand and basically plummets to her doom, and she has this whole soul-searching line about, how, "Maybe you're better off without me." What I love about that moment - about what the writers, the board artists and actor Anna Akana were able to do - is that there's so many emotions in that cocktail of that line.
There's a little bit of hurt, and there's a little bit of pettiness, where it's like, "I guess I'll just go then." We've all felt that way, and I think what it has done is gave us such a wonderful springboard for this character. You can't really get a read on her, because even she doesn't quite know the kind of person she wants to be. I think from as early as "Barrel's Warhammer," you see the chip in her armor, when her companions Percy and Braddock are pushed too far and leave her. And from then, Sasha only really experiences loss. She loses them, she loses Anne, and she loses Marcy because of this path that she had chosen.
By the time you get to a turning point, she's had a full realization that if she continues on her current path, she's going to lose everything. Then when Anne and her are reunited, you really see this new person who is making an effort to change and be different. Again, in a show about change and about these three characters growing in parallel together, it was very rewarding and important for us to stick the landing on that stuff.
The triumvirate of Anne, Sasha and Marcy is such a beautiful element of Amphibia, but I find it interesting how that complicated friendship dynamic is often juxtaposed with the purer and more straightforward friendship between Anne, Sprig and the Plantars. Can you talk about balancing the more quote-unquote human friendship between the girls and the more idealized friendships she finds in Amphibia?
Matt Braly: Absolutely. It's so funny, because I'm a very mechanical writer and somewhat robotic. For me, the Plantars' seed and inception is that sometimes in your life, you've got these friendships that you're locked into - in this case, it was Anne, Sasha and Marcy. You'd amazed when you go outside of that friendship, outside of that bubble, and you start hanging out with different people, because it unlocks different things in you.
The Plantars are really this amazing opportunity for Anne, who is for the first time in a long time separated from her gal pals, to grow and blossom and form new relationships on her own that are not defined by Sasha and Marcy.
I think that comes full circle in the beginning of season 3, when the Planters become her charge. She spends so much time at the beginning of the third season taking care of the Plantars and paying forward the kindness that they showed her when she was stuck in Amphibia. To me, that was the greatest representation of her growth that we could portray.
Many Disney shows engender this, but Amphibia specifically has developed such a large and loyal adult following that really sees all the nuanced layers to the storytelling. What is it like to engage with them, and what has the reception been like for you in this third act?
Matt Braly: It's been really great. I think that my guiding light has always been just to produce and create something that I myself would want to watch. By following that North Star, you can't really go wrong.
I love every little bit of feedback that I read on the show. I really appreciate how much thoughts people have put into these characters, their motivations, and the world. I believe strongly that when something gets made, it sort of doesn't belong to you anymore. It belongs to the world so, for everyone, it's yours now.
I've seen lots of really legit interpretations of our story. And as long as they're not in direct contradiction to our own vision, I'm super chill with that stuff.
The world of fandom is so immersive, especially in a show like Amphibia that leaves so much open to interpretation. Especially, of course, in the world of shipping. Is there any fanon ship that you've been most surprised by or that you find most enjoyable?
Matt Braly: The funniest ship I've seen is Grime and Hop Pop. That one cracks me up. Not only because it's so surprising, but because you sit back and think how this might actually work. You notice that this relationship might play out nicely.
But, yeah, I love shipping. Honestly, I love the creativity that is on display. To me, shipping is the ultimate expression of love for these characters. And it's a tricky balance to walk because, as someone who is laying down the (in quotes) canon on these characters, I want to be very sensitive towards the fandoms that have been built up around them. We're doing our best to do justice by them.
As we go into our last stretch of Amphibia, what do you want fans to know about the next few episodes?
Matt Braly: I think the title of the episodes that make up the finale haven't been released, so I'll just say them. They are "All In" and "The Hardest Thing," and what I'd like to say is that these are huge episodes.
"All In" is about 48 minutes, so it's even longer than a 44-minute episode. And "The Hardest Thing" is about 29 minutes, which makes it way longer than a 22-minute episode. You put these two together, and you'll get the series finale right there.
And when it comes to those two episodes, the team has put so much love and care and effort into these stories and the execution of them. I'm still working on them right now, and I'm blown away at the level of animation and the performances of the voice actors. They really are something special, and I'm immensely proud of them.
I really can't wait for people to see the escalation and the conclusion of these three seasons.
I don't wish to say farewell to Amphibia, but I do wish to know what you are planning to do next. Do you have ideas already, or are you already working on your next world?
Matt Braly: Like any creative, I've got a million ideas, and I am searching inside myself for which one of them is calling the loudest to me.
It's a really exciting time for animation. I think that lots of folks are pushing the medium in really exciting ways. Without getting into specifics, I would really love to try a limited series or a movie; something more epic and grander in scale, because I had so much fun doing those big, dramatic episodes of Amphibia. Whether it's "True Colors," or our season 3 finale pair, "All In" and "The Hardest Thing," those have been such delights to work on. I think I found that I really love that space.
Whatever Braly does next after Amphibia comes to its bittersweet end, fans can be sure he will once again combine important themes with engaging storytelling and memorable characters. If he is given the chance to spread his wings and tackle animated film, he will no doubt be crucial to expanding the boundaries of the medium - much like he has already done through the heartwarming tale of Anne Boonchuy and her frog friends.
Amphibia airs new episodes, split into two parts, every Saturday on the Disney Channel at 9:30am ET. Season 3 is available to stream through the DisneyNOW service, with the first nine episodes also available on Disney+.