Matthew Benjakarn Braly (/ˈbrɑːli/BRAH-lee; born November 8, 1988) is an American animator, storyboard artist, writer, and director. He is best known as the creator and executive producer of the Disney Channel animated series Amphibia.[1] He also worked as a director on Gravity Falls and Big City Greens.
Career
Braly was inspired to pursue a career in animation after a "career day" at high school, where a Pixar animator drew an image of Lumiere from Disney's Beauty and the Beast while talking about working on animation for a living.[2] He started his career studying at the California Institute of the Arts; he graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.[3] After graduating, he joined DreamWorks Animation, where he worked as a storyboard artist for Turbo (2013).[4]
While working on Turbo, Braly and several other DreamWorks Animation storyboard artists went to visit Alex Hirsch, who was working on a show titled Gravity Falls (2012–16) for Disney Television Animation.[4] Hirsch also went to CalArts and, while they never studied together, Braly liked his student films.[4] During the visit, Hirsch pitched Gravity Falls to Braly.[4]
Fascinated by the concept and how Hirsch wanted it to be a serialized program, Braly did a test to work on the show, after which he was hired, serving as a storyboard artist and director for the series.[4] Braly credited Hirsch as the one who "taught [him] so much about storytelling, about developing characters and developing a world", as well as the one who inspired him to create his own show.[4] The series premiered on June 15, 2012, and ended on February 15, 2016.[5] In 2016, Braly won an Annie Award for directing the Gravity Falls episode "Northwest Mansion Mystery".[6] Braly also served as an in-house key animator for the closing scene for the episode "Not What He Seems".[7]
After directing on Big City Greens,[4][8] Braly developed a series titled Amphibia for Disney Channel.[9] The series centers on the adventures of a Thai-American girl named Anne Boonchuy in the titular amphibian-populated world.[9] The series was inspired by Braly's childhood trips to Bangkok, Thailand, where he felt like an outsider but ultimately ended up not wanting to leave.[10] He also drew inspiration from video games such as The Legend of Zelda and Chrono Trigger.[11] Braly, who is Thai-American himself, made the choice of making the lead character Thai-American due to a wish to creating a Thai character, as there were few Thai lead characters in television series when he was a kid.[12] The series aired for three seasons consisting of 58 episodes from June 17, 2019, to May 14, 2022. He considers the series finale "The Hardest Thing" to be his favorite episode.[13]
After Amphibia ended production in May 2022, Braly left Disney Television Animation. In August 2023, he wrote a Sonic the Hedgehog online comic strip as a part of the Sonic Fast Friends Forever campaign.[14] On December 14, 2023, it was announced that Braly is set to direct a fantasy-adventure film for Sony Pictures Animation from a screenplay he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Rebecca Sugar; the film will center on an ill boy who travels to a spiritual Thai world.[15][16] Braly is also developing a graphic novel,[16] which was announced in August 2024 as Family Force V. Skybound Comet is set to publish the graphic novel in May 2025.[17] Braly is also supervising development on a series of shorts exploring social issues. In November 2024, Braly responded to the reported shelving of an episode of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, focusing on a transgender character, by Disney, calling it "absolute cowardice" when content like the episode is needed more now than ever, and said it was a "total breakdown" of the process.[18][19]
As a child, Braly used to watch films such as Mortal Kombat (1995) due to them being filmed in Thailand, as there was no Thai representation on television.[12] He also used to draw characters from franchises like Mortal Kombat and Sonic the Hedgehog.[2] Braly is a fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and was inspired by the opening sequence in the first episode of the anime Sonic X for the climax of the Amphibia episode "True Colors".[2] Similarly, he was inspired by several horror films for the episode "The Shut-In" due to being a horror fan.[2] He is also a fan of the Disney series Gargoyles and the film The Princess and the Frog; cast members from both productions have appeared through Amphibia.[24] Both Braly and his wife are fans of RuPaul's Drag Race; RuPaul himself had a recurring role in season 3 of Amphibia.[25]
