Kristen Schaal has one voice, high and bright and slightly unhinged, and she has spent a career finding out how many people it can be. In Mabel Pines it found the one it was made for.
Fi1m perspective
The laugh comes first. In Gravity Falls (2012) Mabel Pines laughs a beat before her own joke, and Kristen Schaal makes that laugh the sound of the whole series: a child who has decided the summer is going to be wonderful and will not be told otherwise. The voice is high, bright and pitched somewhere between a twelve-year-old and a kettle, and it never sounds put on. Most comic actors reach for a funny voice when they need one. Schaal seems to have arrived with hers and spent the years since working out who it belongs to.
She began in New York stand-up after Northwestern, and the part that got her noticed was Mel in Flight of the Conchords (2007), a fan of the band whose devotion shades into stalking and who is played, throughout, without a wink. Mel set the pattern: obsessive, socially adrift, entirely certain of herself. Since then the voice has mostly worked out of sight. Louise Belcher in Bob's Burgers from 2011, Trixie in Toy Story 3 (2010), Mabel from 2012 to 2016, alongside eight years as a correspondent on The Daily Show and, in the flesh, Carol Pilbasian in The Last Man on Earth (2015). Alex Hirsch wrote Mabel specifically for her, and the fit is audible.
Mabel is the performance to start with. Schaal plays the cheerfulness as a decision rather than a temperament, which is why it is funny and why, more often than a children's cartoon has any right to manage, it is touching. We did not expect to be moved by a girl in a jumper with a grappling hook, and we were, because Schaal lets you hear how hard Mabel is working to keep the summer wonderful. Jason Ritter's Dipper, tight and worried, is the other half of it; the two sound like siblings who have shared a room for twelve years, and neither would be half as good alone.
The caveat is the size of the instrument. It is one voice, and in live action it can fill a room faster than a scene wants it to. Our own review of Flight of the Conchords did not find room to mention her, and that is fair comment on the part as well as the review: Mel is a running gag, funny each time she turns up and gone the moment she leaves. Schaal is best when a script gives the voice something to want and someone quieter to want it at. Hirsch understood that.
She has said of her early years that she realised she could not control how the industry cast its projects, but she could control making her own comedy. It is the right instinct for an actor whose best part was written with her in mind. Start with Gravity Falls, give the first run the patience our review asked for, and wait for the laugh.
Biography
Kristen Schaal is an American actress, comedian and writer. She played Mel in the HBO series Flight of the Conchords (2007–2009).
Schaal voices Louise Belcher in Bob's Burgers and has voiced Mabel Pines in Gravity Falls (2012–2016). Other credits include roles in The Last Man on Earth (2015–2018), The Daily Show (2008–2016) and voice work in the Toy Story films (2010, 2019). She was born on 24 January 1978 in Longmont, Colorado, and graduated from Northwestern University.
