Ryan Gillis & Sunil Hall Discuss the Creation of Disney’s StuGo

Back in 2018, Ryan Gillis inked an overall deal with Disney Television Animation, leading to years of hard work and creative brainstorming that paid off earlier this year with the debut of StuGo on Disney Channel. The animated series follows six middle schoolers who are tricked into attending a fake academic summer camp run by a mad scientist. They end up on a Caribbean-inspired tropical island filled with fighting fungi, mind-reading manatees and plenty of other dangerous, fantastical creatures.

The show is loosely inspired by Gillis’ childhood growing up in southern Florida, where he spent an extensive amount of time outside. “Nature is so present in the Caribbean and the tropics,” he explains. “You can’t think of yourself as separate from it. It’s crawling in your house, it’s eating the walls. There are animals in the bathroom. I grew up very aware [of nature].”

“My brother was a biologist, and he used to love catching stuff,” he continues. “I’d go out and I wouldn’t help him, but I’d take photos. He would do the hard work, and I would then show photos of him holding [animals] and be like, I was there! I grew up in a space where I was thinking about animals all the time. I love animals, and this show is a wonderful vehicle for strange stories.”

When it came time to pitch something to Disney, “I had notebooks full of stuff,” Gillis says. “I assembled them into a giant Florida pile and filtered them through this experience that happened to me where I went on a study abroad gone wrong.”

Disney signed on for the concept and brought Titmouse on board to produce. Titmouse was a serendipitous choice as a partner for the series, as Gillis had previously spent time as an animator at the studio a decade prior.

Titmouse’s Sunil Hall came on as a co-executive producer, bringing his extensive experience in the animation industry to the production. “I was the showrunner on The Mighty Ones for DreamWorks, and StuGo has a similar pipeline and animation style,” Hall says. “We were actually able to bring over a lot of the artists who worked on The Mighty Ones. It was really great for me to bring all that experience and knowledge from the previous show and apply it to this one. It was kind of a leg up when we got started, and we were able to get some really amazing work out of the team.”

And though Gillis has over a decade of experience in the industry himself, he acknowledges the massive benefits Hall brought. “I would say the majority of the experience [brought] to the show was Sunil’s,” he comments. “Everyone says season ones are difficult, but he was able to jump over a lot of rough patches.”

In addition to the experience of the creatives behind the scenes, the talent of the voice cast helped the show shine as well. From Zosia Mamet, Gabourey Sidibe and Lorraine Toussaint to Tania Gunadi, Zach Reino and Charlyne Yi, there was a wealth of talent involved. “They’re all just so funny,” Gillis says. “They all get the jokes. We asked them to riff, and every single one of them makes me laugh out loud. They get exactly what we’re trying to do.”

The hope is that children will see themselves in the six characters, who are all at an age of discovery. “They’re all preteens and doing a lot of growing, as real kids are at that age, too,” Hall says. “I hope a lot of kids can relate to that.”

Plus, “they’re very high-performing back in school, but they’re thrust into this unfamiliar environment, and they’re forced to use their skills to cope in different ways and discover new things about themselves,” Hall continues. And their adventures show kids that “failure is OK. You can learn from it. It can be a positive thing.”

Like Gillis, many of the creatives behind the scenes “love animals and nature, and a lot of the characters love animals and nature,” the creator says. “Even though it’s sci-fi and we’re embellishing, [it’s about] thinking about how animals work, how the ecosystem works. So, maybe [the show will] spark a little curiosity, too.”

StuGo reflects what happens when a creative is given the chance to fully round out and shape their idea. On earning that chance for himself and signing the overall deal with Disney Television Animation all those years ago, Gillis says, “That was one of the luckiest positions in my whole life. It’s very rare that you get to focus on an idea for that amount of time, and in the meanwhile, I got to work on shows like The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse and meet all those creators.”

He adds, “And my development exec, Elizabeth Waybright Taylor, was such a good shepherd for this thing, and it takes a long time. She just loved the idea, and she took care of it for years. I couldn’t have asked for a better development process.”