Happy Tree Friends creators Kenn Navarro (left) and Rhode Montijo

What kind of mind does it take to devise fresh, new ways of mutilating cute lil’ cartoon animals? An inventive one, naturally enough, and Kenn Navarro proves his resourcefulness with every episode of Happy Tree Friends. Created by Navarro and Rhode Montijo at Mondo Media, the animated series follows the colorful hijinks of its cast of cuddly critters—all of whom inevitably meet grisly ends. Previously, Happy Tree Friends was an internet- and DVD-only phenomenon, but now American citizens can view episodes on their cable-equipped TV sets courtesy of G4’s Attack of the Show. In this interview, Navarro reveals how such gruesomely good entertainment came to be.

What are the roots of Happy Tree Friends?

We started Mondo Media in 2000, around that time when the big internet dot-com bust happened. We were doing a whole bunch of internet shows, cartoons like God and Devil and Thugs on Film. We would have all sorts of different jobs that would come through and we were brainstorming for one of the jobs and we happened upon this idea of making like a really violent cartoon out of these really cute and cuddly characters that would meet these really gruesome demises. And for some reason, that just completely cracked us up. I don’t know why, and I still can’t explain to this day why, but it would just crack us up and we came up with a laundry list of all these scenarios, like putting them in a building on fire that all of a sudden burst into flames and somebody had to help. But even at that time, we didn’t even know that it was going to be that serious. We just thought it was one of those jokes. Out of every brainstorming, 40 percent of the stuff is unusable anyway. It was just stuff that would crack us up.

How did you pitch it to your company?

Later on when Mondo started looking for more content and more shows, it opened up the pitch to all of the creative people here, and Rhodie and I were looking at each other and thought “Hey, let’s dust off that idea. I think it just might be crazy enough to work.” So that’s what we did: We started from one sketch on a little piece of paper that Rhodie drew of a character who later became Shifty, and then up from that Rhodie had this great idea of drawing a poster that actually was of a rabbit, who later became known as Cuddles, and at the bottom it said “Resistance is Futile.” So we just stuck it up on our workstation where everyone could see it, so that in our thinking it would subconsciously influence people to think “You know, that show could work.” Eventually, we pitched the show internally and they liked it although they did not understand it at first, but they were like “Yeah, I think it could work.” So, we would get questions like, “So they die every episode but then they come back?” We were like, “Yeah, it’s brilliant. Don’t you get it?” “Okay…” So it was a little bit of a bump right there because it was so crazy. But eventually we got to do it and had a lot of fun just knocking all those ideas out and doing all this crazy, crazy stuff that we were able to get away with that you couldn’t get away with on TV or any other media aside from the internet, to this day even.

When did HTF actually launch?

Originally, it was going to be part of Sony’s supposedly big website POP.com which never popped I guess. Then there was another website that it was supposed to launch on, but that kind of stumbled, too. So eventually we were like, well, we'll just put it out on the Mondo site as part of the galaxy of shows that we had out there. So it went out and we high-fived each other and were like, “Wow, that was great.” And then the big dot-com burst happened and BOOM it was like a nuclear bomb went off and everything ceased production, everything stopped. And we were scratching our heads and saying “What are we going to do now?” So one of the shows that had this huge cult following happened to be Happy Tree Friends, and we had the idea to put out a DVD and see if all five people who love the show will buy it. So we put them together and made the DVD, and to our surprise it sold through and kept selling through, which prompted us to go, “Hey you know maybe we should do more of these little cartoons.”

What kind of reactions did you get from people who just happened upon this cartoon?

You can imagine from the content, we get the extremes. You get people who are like “Ahhh, that was great!” Part of the show, too, is that we try to catch people off guard, especially if you watch it for the first time. It’s really sweet and cute on the outside, and then you watch it and you’re like “Oh my gosh!” I think that is part of why the show works so much. We also get a lot of great hate mail, which I love to read. This crazy, crazy really vicious stuff. “Oh my god, how can you guys do this? It is completely wrong on all levels.” Stuff like that. We get the extremes of feedback which is great, I love reading all that stuff.

From start to finish, how long does it take to create one episode?

The actual production probably takes about two-three weeks, from once we have a locked concept, story boarding and scripting and doing assets and stuff like that. The brainstorming is a little more amorphous. Sometimes it’s easy—we will get a really funny episode like that, but sometimes it takes about two-three weeks to come up with a decent concept that we will just throw out the window anyway at the end of it. But I think we can turn around an episode within a month. Back in the early days when the shows were a minute long, we would bang the episodes out in a week, actually. So that was a pretty crazy schedule, but now it’s better. They are a little bit longer and we get more time to give it a little bit more love. 

Are you ever afraid that you might run out of new dismemberment ideas?

Oh my gosh, all the time—and every time there is a bad brainstorm we go, “How many times can we skin the cat”? That is the question, but amazingly the most random things will spark ideas. And it’s tough because the more you do, the more you can’t do because it’s like, “We can’t do that because we already did that this episode.” But inspiration hits from anywhere. One of my newer favorite episodes is called “Out on a Limb” which has Lumpy in it, and one of our writers came in with a news article from Yahoo about that guy, the mountain climber, who got stuck somewhere because his arm got stuck in a boulder or something like that, and he had to cut his own arm off. And we were just like, “That is so gnarly, that’s great, it is totally a Happy Tree episode.” So we wrote a whole episode based on that, and Lumpy gets his leg stuck in a tree, with enough changes so we don’t get sued by the guy.

Have you ever stopped yourself and said “No. I’ve gone too far.”

There have been a couple of times when we will get ideas and go, “Oh my gosh, that is just wrong.” But for me, that’s when it has to go in. There is this thing we call in our writing group “the cringe factor,” and it’s when we try to get that visceral reaction of pulling that optic nerve, or just poking that eye—that kind of reaction where people just go “That’s just wrong!” And a lot of times when we come up with something and crack up at it and go “we can’t put that in,” for me, that is going in for sure. So we’ve never really had to pull back on anything. There has been some weird stuff with these two characters Pop and Cub and sometimes we will get really funky ideas to do it with Cub, but that would just be wrong. But we’ve never really pulled back on anything like that. Like I said, for me, it’s the opposite reaction. It’s like, “That’s we want. That’s what we are going to go for.”

Where do the characters come from?

They came from a whole bunch of different areas. Some of them came from the original ideas that we had when we were just kicking it around from the original concepts. Handy was one of the—we wanted a character that didn’t have any arms to do this kind of concept work. He was trying to save this person, but he couldn’t because he didn’t have any arms to do anything. That was born out of the episode, but the flipside of that is, ironically enough, Flippy, a character who is this war vet, which we just thought was hilarious, I don’t know why, but for us, post-traumatic stress syndrome seemed to be comic gold. He would just flip out at any scenario and just go nuts, this Hollywood-type guy that goes “Arrghhh!” and dismantles the whole room. That was born more out of the character and then later on fit in the world. So they came from all sorts of different angles. A character called Splendid wrote in a huge comic book geeks. I’ve been reading comic books all my life and obviously this is our chance, whereas Flippy was our chance to do like really cool action type stuff, Splendid was a great opportunity to do more superhero stuff that we totally love. So it’s an accumulation of all the TV shows we have watched and loved over the years and just funneled through the Happy Tree Friends filter.

Do you have any animators that serve as your main influences?

That’s going be tough. You are going to make me whittle it down. Well, I would have to say one of them for sure Richard Williams, classically trained animator, did a movie called The Thief and the Cobbler. Beautifully animated and I think he is just one of the masters. I was lucky enough to go to one of his animation seminars and he just completely opened my eyes. I went to school for animation and did all that stuff, but after his class I felt like my experience before that was just the tip of the iceberg. He just blew the doors out of the whole concept of animation for me. So he is definitely one of the biggest influences.

Obviously, all the Nine Old Men, all the old Disney cartoons. Those guys are the grandfathers, literally building animation from the ground up. How could you not be influenced by that? And then the flipside, the Warner Brothers guys. If you watch Happy Tree Friends, they are basically just all those Warner Brothers cartoons we watched in between shows all the time when we were growing up. It’s that kind of Roadrunner and Coyote action comedy timing—we have tons of references in the show to anvils. And more recently Genndy Tartakovsky’s work—both his Clone Wars series and his Samurai Jack are beautiful shows, just great designs, great layout. It’s really cool to do something completely graphic like that has never really been done before for TV.

Do you think the general public is ready to witness Happy Tree Friends on television?

Probably not, but we will force it down their throat anyway. Its the Happy Tree Friends way, just go in there brute force and just do it. I don’t think anybody is ever ready for it until it happens, but then it’s like “Ohh, all right, there it is.”

Where do you foresee the Happy Tree Friends empire going next?

I think ice is the last horizon. When there is a “Happy Tree Friends on Ice” coming right next to Cirque du Soleil, I’ll know that we’ve made it.