Dave Gallagher and his son Noah Gallagher discuss their AnimSchool Studios’ 3DCG series, set in an alternate Old West filled with mistreated robots, where the compassion of an offbeat young woman, Pearl for a curiously intelligent ‘mech’ named Six brings a new outlook to her town.
The dusty, six-shooter-filled world of the cowboy is a storytelling fixture as old as cinema itself, filled with heroes, villains – often gravelly voiced and quite weathered – and even a few aliens. But now we have a show that takes the land of buckaroos in a completely different direction.
Cowboys and robots have now joined forces in the 3DCG animated YouTube series, MechWest, created by Dave Gallagher, a former character development supervisor at Blue Sky Studios who worked on films like Ice Age, Robots, Horton Hears a Who!, and Rio.
Starring Natalie Rarick (The Lost Amulet of Sonora) and Luis Bermudez (Invincible Fight Girl), MechWest is set in an alternate Old West world where humans mistreat their robots, known as “mechs.” Pearl West (Rarick) and her offbeat enthusiasm for robots isn't exactly popular with the rest of her Wild West town. Even her brother Pico West (Bermudez), the town’s star cowboy, doesn’t fully understand his sister. But with the arrival of “Six,” a curiously intelligent mech, Pearl's unique compassion begins turning the world on its head.
The first episode, “Where the West Begins, Part I” went viral with over a million views in 2024. The series’ 3rd episode releases today, June 27, on the MechWest subscriber channel, and will be shared with the general public in mid-July. The team will also be hosting a San Diego Comic Con panel, “How Indie Animation Challenges the Industry” on Saturday, July 26, from 8-9 p.m. in Room 9 of the San Diego Convention Center.
Check out the show’s trailer:
The series is produced by Dave’s AnimSchool Studios. He founded AnimSchool in 2010, an accredited (ACCSC) online 3D animation institution with around 500 students worldwide and more than 70 instructors who work, or have worked at DreamWorks, Disney, Sony, and Pixar.
“It started with me and a few colleagues from work teaching classes, and it’s grown steadily ever since,” says Dave, who created AnimSchool Studios in 2020. “And we continue to grow, even though the industry is having a rough patch at the moment.”
Dave works on the series with his son Noah Gallagher, who helps write the scripts and whose friend Clifford James Taylor serves as co-writer on the show.
“Clifford is the son of Moroni Taylor, a pretty well-known story artist I worked with at Blue Sky, and Noah’s written several novels, so it’s not like he’s new to writing,” says Dave. “We also had these great student showcases with AnimSchool, and it got to the level where I realized we could probably do something together that’s actually objectively interesting and cool and where the students and graduates would be able to work together, and be paid, as a team. We also live near Zion National Park, which is a constant inspiration.”
So far, MechWest’s episodes have been released about six months apart and, together, have garnered roughly 3 million views on the show’s YouTube channel. But after so much world-building and establishing the moralities of using and abusing robots designed to hold toilet paper, deliver the mail, and clean up after their human masters, Dave, Noah and their crew are now diving into team dynamics among the main characters and taking a less solemn approach in Episode 3, “Centureno.”
“Pearl and Pico have formed a little group with the salesman Casey McCroy,” shares Noah. “He still has his eyes set on Six for this crystal the robot possesses, which is pretty valuable. That’s going to come to a head. Is Casey going to try and steal it? Or will they become friends?”
Dave adds, “We’ve done a lot of work setting up the story. Some things have been pretty serious but, in this next episode, we leave a lot of that behind us so we can have a little more fun and be a bit funnier and lighter.”
Six, the tiny robot that won Pearl’s heart, is basically a large can with short robotic arms and legs sticking out the sides. At the center of the can is a large lightbulb that serves as Six’s eye. Below the light there is an assortment of letter blocks, side by side, that Six can make roll like a Vegas slot machine in order to communicate.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” shares Dave. “Six’s character is kind of built on a duck. You can see it if you look at his flat feet, the way they're shaped and angled, and how the hood on top is like a bill. He also waddles. The final design was done by Jake Parker, who I also used to work with at Blue Sky.”
And in Episode 3, there are new mechs being introduced; mechs that dote on the story’s villain.
“There’s a perfume mech, a jewelry mech, a nail polish mech, a wardrobe mech, and a hair brushing mech,” says Dave. “It gets silly, but I think the episode is pretty dang entertaining. In almost every episode we’re going to be introducing new mechs.”
And new cultures.
“We have four cultures that we’re going to explore in the show throughout the season and they all think of mechs differently and design them differently depending on their use,” explains Noah. “So, Meridian, Pearl’s home, is based on the Wild West and the mechs there are more blocky and simple.”
But, in Episode 4, the series is exploring a new group of people who craft their mechs to honor the natural world.
“There are mechs shaped like horses, buffalo, squirrels, and birds,” shares Dave. “They are very articulately designed mechs and, to be 100 percent frank, I don’t actually know if it’s going to work. We might have to go back, tear it apart and redo the models. There’s a lot of flying by the seat of your pants with this show.”
Though the team might spend a lot of time deep in the weeds of mechanics with each episode, the foundation of the show has always possessed a clear through-line for everyone involved that serves as the guiding star in production.
“MechWest is about understanding and not dehumanizing others,” says Noah. “One thing I’m really looking forward to talking about more in future episodes is how some of the ways people have treated the mechs has conditioned the robots to achieve less than their potential. Pearl will bring that true potential out of them. We want to talk about what’s right, what’s wrong, and honor the world's complexity. We want this show to feel earnest and not cynical.”
Dave, Noah, and the animators are also working on harnessing their own full potential, hoping to spend no more than four months between episodes.
“I don’t know if we can actually get there but the first episode took two years, the next one took ten months and this latest one took just over five months,” says Dave. “We’re operating on approximately one percent of a Disney Pixar release in terms of money. We've had a lot of interest from distributors, but it's also coinciding with a time when distributors aren't really buying a lot of stuff right now, so there've been a lot of near misses where distributors have said, ‘It’s not our style,’ or ‘It’s not quite our brand.’”
Dave continues, “We're doing an indie style with a different approach and we're not asking permission. We said, ‘We’ll just see if the public wants it.’”
Going viral on YouTube has been a pretty clear indication to Dave that MechWest has legs to run, or waddle, and on its own if necessary.
“We’ve amped up,” says Dave. “We’ve hired more animators and are aiming to produce eight episodes in this season. We also have multiple seasons planned. I wish we weren’t competing with the YouTube algorithm because we don’t post as much as regular YouTubers, where it costs them $5 and a day to post 20-minutes of content. But we didn’t set out to make a YouTube show. It doesn’t need to be feature-level quality to be enjoyed on YouTube, but that’s what we wanted to do.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
