If you havent heard of the Happy Tree Friends then you will probably look at the images included with this interview and go Ugh! Crappy kids stuff. But to avoid the Happy Tree Friends is to miss one of the sickest and most violent cartoons ever made. Faces are sliced off, bodies are crushed underneath tons of metal and guts spill out in nearly every episode. It first started out as shorts on the internet, then half hour shows are produced for television and now the first season of Happy Tree Friends has just been released on DVD. I got a chance to talk with Happy Tree Friends co-creator Kenn Navarro.
Buy the DVD of Season one of Happy Tree Friends
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you doing today?
Kenn Navarro: We were doing some Happy Tree Friends graphics and working on finishing up a Fall Out Boy video that were doing.
DRE: Is it an animated video?
Kenn: Yeah, its basically a Happy Tree Friends episode to one of the new Fall Out Boy songs.
DRE: Thats great. How did that come together?
Kenn: I think there are some people either as part of the band or one of their managers was a fan of Happy Tree Friends. We were fans of them too and somehow somebody knew somebody and said Hey, wouldnt it be great if we collaborated on this video? So all the pieces fell into place. Its pretty cool.
DRE: Happy Tree Friends has been bubbling under the surface for many years. Have you noticed it coming to a head with this new DVD?
Kenn: Yeah, we always associate it with the snowball effect. When Rhode [Montijo] and I created the show we just did it for fun. We were working on other projects and the nuggets of Happy Tree Friends was an inside joke that we would tell each other or draw to make the other guy laugh. To go from that to what it is today is pretty amazing. We started putting out those one minute shorts on the internet back in 99, early 2000. That was back on the cusp of the internet. But the fans glommed onto it and theyre very tenacious, which is great. Its really a testament to all the fans out there who forwarded it along.
DRE: Do you guys both do the animation for it or do you just write and direct?
Kenn: We did in the past. Recently we expanded it to a half hour TV show and we cant do the animation for that because it would take a lot longer for us to do it in-house. We have a company in Canada called Fat Kat who is doing the animation for the series.
DRE: Did you have to go up there and train them to make sure they get your vision correctly?
Kenn: No, I didnt have to go up there. We were going to but our producer went up there instead. We work with Macromedia Flash so everythings pretty much laid out there. On our end, we do the writing, storyboarding and the animatics. We send that to them in the Flash program and then they run with it.
DRE: How many people work on Happy Tree Friends?
Kenn: Youd be surprised. Our team is pretty small. The company used to be about 120 but now its less than 20. With a lot of the animation being outsourced to Canada we dont have a lot of those artists around. So its not as big as you would think it would be. Back in the day we had a full studio when we were cranking out all the Happy Tree Friends internet shorts.
DRE: I heard Rhode is not involved in the show anymore.
Kenn: Rhode wanted to do a childrens book, which is his lifelong dream. He was able to get one of the big childrens book publishers to publish one of his books.
DRE: Are you the last of the original creators left?
Kenn: No, not necessarily. Theres another writer by the name of Warren Graff who has been here from the beginning. Warren does a few of the characters voices. Recently weve gotten help from another fellow named Ken Pontac whos been writing for TV and stuff like that. Hes helped us take these minute long cartoons and flesh them out into half-hour shows since he has all that experience under his belt.
DRE: I read that youre a very big cartoon fan so you know how difficult it is to create new characters.
Kenn: Oh yeah. But I guess Ill caveat that, its not hard to create them. But it is s hard to strike a chord and have them resonate with people. We have a big cast in Happy Tree Friends and once we started going with it, we would get emails saying, Hey this is my favorite character and this is my favorite character So everybody has their favorite character, which is great. I always thought there would be one or two characters that people really loved and that would be it. That was pretty cool and unexpected.
DRE: Were the characters originally pictures from a sketchbook?
Kenn: I think the characters were probably the last thing we came up with. The idea of just taking these cute creatures and putting them through the most horrendous things that we could think of just cracked us up for some reason. I guess it cracked a lot of people up too. I think its like watching someone slipping on a banana. I cant really explain why its funny, it just is. Even today when we write, thats our litmus test. In the writers room we try to crack each other up with these scenarios. Somebody interviewed us a few years ago and asked, Is this revenge on all those years of growing up on Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake? Which I did watch when I was growing up. I thought, Maybe it is. Not consciously but it probably is. There were all those super sweet shows in the 80s like the Smurfs and the Gummi Bears.
DRE: The Gummi Bears was just a Smurfs rip off.
Kenn: Yeah, but I loved the Gummi Bears. It was such a great show and it was really well animated.
Once we got to that point, we fleshed out the world and said, Okay, here are the rules of the world and here are the characters. We came up with some of the characters and their quirks and stuff like that and situations that we could put them in.
DRE: I got sent a DVD of the Happy Tree Friends years ago and I said, What is this crap? Im not going to watch this. I really thought it was some happy little crap cartoon.
Kenn: [laughs] Exactly, exactly.
DRE: It wasnt until I caught it on TV that I realized how sick it was. Have you ever gotten much hate mail from parents who watch it with their kids because they think its sweet and cute and then get upset when they see what it really is?
Kenn: Oh yeah, all the time. Those kinds of letters and emails are my favorite. They write in and theyre so passionate and angry. They tell us, Oh, how could you do this? You guys are terrible people. Please stop. They would ask us how we got an internet license and all this stuff.
DRE: [laughs] Internet license?
Kenn: I know. I remember distinctly this one letter some woman wrote us. Im paraphrasing, I would rather put my son in front of a four way intersection before letting him watch Happy Tree Friends.
DRE: Thats messed up.
Kenn: Exactly and its ironic. It is like, Whats wrong with this picture? It really strikes a chord with people. But its all done tongue in cheek and we always say, No real animals were harmed and they come back every time just like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. I always tell people that our cartoon is just as violent as all those early Warner Bros. stuff. We just kick it to the next level with showing the blood and the guts and what would really happen if an anvil fell on your head.
DRE: I know that since you guys created the show online. Do you guys still own it?
Kenn: Mondo Media still retains all the rights for Happy Tree Friends.
DRE: Are you Mondo?
Kenn: Well, I work for Mondo. Id love to say I am Mondo but I am not.
DRE: Where does Happy Tree Friends show now?
Kenn: Right now, I think theyre still on G4. I dont think theyve finished airing a full season yet. They might have taken a hiatus. Im not really sure what the scheduling is but the half hours are still on G4 and we show some of them online too. But weve been working on the half hours so much that we havent been able to make shorts. After doing all the big half hour shows I want to go back to our roots and make some more internet shorts. But maybe next year well do some more of those shorter ones for the internet. But you can go to the Happy Tree Friends website and watch all the episodes. It is also on MTV in places like Germany and Latin America.
DRE: Have you found that its very popular overseas?
Kenn: It is. Its actually way more popular overseas than it is here, which is a little strange.
DRE: But isnt that cool at the same time?
Kenn: Yeah, thats totally cool. I love it. That is a byproduct of not having a language for the show. We didnt plan for it but it really helped us internationally. Not having the characters speak was borne out of me and Rhodes laziness. When we used to work on other shows, we would see how the directors would struggle on their scripts and never get them right. We were like, When we do a show lets not have any dialogue. When we did Happy Tree Friends we didnt have any dialogue, we just had them squeaking and screaming and stuff like that. That alone has really helped us internationally. We have so much cool product outside of the US that will never make it here.
DRE: How did the Happy Tree Friends get sold overseas?
Kenn: I think they just found it through the internet. The beauty of the internet is that it goes wherever there is an internet connection. Once we started rolling out the DVDs and all this stuff we found licensers who wanted to license the DVDs overseas. I think our biggest boost overseas was when MTV picked it up in Asia and Europe. They used them as bumpers before commercials and that started a big groundswell reaction.
DRE: I know youre a comic book fan; do you want to do Happy Tree Friends comics?
Kenn: Oh man, that opportunity came about a few years ago but we werent sure how to tackle it. Rhode and I are huge comic book fans. I go every Wednesday to pick up my weekly fix. But we didnt want to just come out with a comic book version of Happy Tree Friends.
DRE: Yeah, most comic books based on cartoons suck.
Kenn: We were trying to think What can we do to give this a little bit more of a twist something to make it a uniquely Happy Tree. But it stalled a little bit. Id love to revisit that someday if we have some time.
DRE: There must be a Happy Tree Friends videogame coming soon.
Kenn: We are in the really early process of working up an Xbox live arcade game. Were trying to shoot for release early next year but it all depends. There are so many moving parts on that. Im a huge gamer too so Im psyched.
DRE: How did Happy Tree Friends end up being featured in The Good Girl [directed by Miguel Arteta]?
Kenn: It was the same thing. There was a producer or manager or somebody from their side that was a really big fan of the show. They had the scene theyre getting high and watching TV. One of the guys here said, When you see Happy Tree Friends in one of those scenes its always shorthand for the fall of Western civilization. [laughs]
DRE: Do you feel like Happy Tree Friends has gotten more complex over the years?
Kenn: The half hour ones are definitely more complex. When we were first told that we were going to do half hours, I was like, Whoa, I dont even know if thats possible without any dialogue. It took us a few months and we had to go retool everything. Theyre supposed to be really simple but the underlying stuff behind Happy Tree Friends is surprisingly complex. Sometimes it is really hard to get your ideas across, especially if theres no dialogue. Also since these little characters are running around with these really stumpy arms and legs, you cant get the cleanest poses or the cleanest emotions out of them. So theres a little bit of a struggle there. I remember there were certain really good concepts that we had to kill because it was like, Oh thats never going to come across. Thats the obstacle that we always have to come up against. Sometimes we find really funny and challenging ways to come up with it, but for the most part we just try to keep it simple so that even if you have the sound off you can see whats going on.
DRE: Do you think youll ever give them voices?
Kenn: Well, they have voices.
DRE: Well, you know what I mean, with words.
Kenn: No, I think thats part of the charm. Again when we were trying to retool the half hour we were like, Well, should we start letting them talk? Years ago there was a Tom & Jerry movie and they actually talked
DRE: That sucked.
Kenn: Yeah, exactly. It sucked.
DRE: When they made Aeon Flux talk, that sucked too.
Kenn: Right, so again it was like, Oh she was much cooler when she didnt talk.
So the show works right now so we dont want to break that unless theres some really funny gag that we can do for it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy the DVD of Season one of Happy Tree Friends
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you doing today?
Kenn Navarro: We were doing some Happy Tree Friends graphics and working on finishing up a Fall Out Boy video that were doing.
DRE: Is it an animated video?
Kenn: Yeah, its basically a Happy Tree Friends episode to one of the new Fall Out Boy songs.
DRE: Thats great. How did that come together?
Kenn: I think there are some people either as part of the band or one of their managers was a fan of Happy Tree Friends. We were fans of them too and somehow somebody knew somebody and said Hey, wouldnt it be great if we collaborated on this video? So all the pieces fell into place. Its pretty cool.
DRE: Happy Tree Friends has been bubbling under the surface for many years. Have you noticed it coming to a head with this new DVD?
Kenn: Yeah, we always associate it with the snowball effect. When Rhode [Montijo] and I created the show we just did it for fun. We were working on other projects and the nuggets of Happy Tree Friends was an inside joke that we would tell each other or draw to make the other guy laugh. To go from that to what it is today is pretty amazing. We started putting out those one minute shorts on the internet back in 99, early 2000. That was back on the cusp of the internet. But the fans glommed onto it and theyre very tenacious, which is great. Its really a testament to all the fans out there who forwarded it along.
DRE: Do you guys both do the animation for it or do you just write and direct?
Kenn: We did in the past. Recently we expanded it to a half hour TV show and we cant do the animation for that because it would take a lot longer for us to do it in-house. We have a company in Canada called Fat Kat who is doing the animation for the series.
DRE: Did you have to go up there and train them to make sure they get your vision correctly?
Kenn: No, I didnt have to go up there. We were going to but our producer went up there instead. We work with Macromedia Flash so everythings pretty much laid out there. On our end, we do the writing, storyboarding and the animatics. We send that to them in the Flash program and then they run with it.
DRE: How many people work on Happy Tree Friends?
Kenn: Youd be surprised. Our team is pretty small. The company used to be about 120 but now its less than 20. With a lot of the animation being outsourced to Canada we dont have a lot of those artists around. So its not as big as you would think it would be. Back in the day we had a full studio when we were cranking out all the Happy Tree Friends internet shorts.
DRE: I heard Rhode is not involved in the show anymore.
Kenn: Rhode wanted to do a childrens book, which is his lifelong dream. He was able to get one of the big childrens book publishers to publish one of his books.
DRE: Are you the last of the original creators left?
Kenn: No, not necessarily. Theres another writer by the name of Warren Graff who has been here from the beginning. Warren does a few of the characters voices. Recently weve gotten help from another fellow named Ken Pontac whos been writing for TV and stuff like that. Hes helped us take these minute long cartoons and flesh them out into half-hour shows since he has all that experience under his belt.
DRE: I read that youre a very big cartoon fan so you know how difficult it is to create new characters.
Kenn: Oh yeah. But I guess Ill caveat that, its not hard to create them. But it is s hard to strike a chord and have them resonate with people. We have a big cast in Happy Tree Friends and once we started going with it, we would get emails saying, Hey this is my favorite character and this is my favorite character So everybody has their favorite character, which is great. I always thought there would be one or two characters that people really loved and that would be it. That was pretty cool and unexpected.
DRE: Were the characters originally pictures from a sketchbook?
Kenn: I think the characters were probably the last thing we came up with. The idea of just taking these cute creatures and putting them through the most horrendous things that we could think of just cracked us up for some reason. I guess it cracked a lot of people up too. I think its like watching someone slipping on a banana. I cant really explain why its funny, it just is. Even today when we write, thats our litmus test. In the writers room we try to crack each other up with these scenarios. Somebody interviewed us a few years ago and asked, Is this revenge on all those years of growing up on Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake? Which I did watch when I was growing up. I thought, Maybe it is. Not consciously but it probably is. There were all those super sweet shows in the 80s like the Smurfs and the Gummi Bears.
DRE: The Gummi Bears was just a Smurfs rip off.
Kenn: Yeah, but I loved the Gummi Bears. It was such a great show and it was really well animated.
Once we got to that point, we fleshed out the world and said, Okay, here are the rules of the world and here are the characters. We came up with some of the characters and their quirks and stuff like that and situations that we could put them in.
DRE: I got sent a DVD of the Happy Tree Friends years ago and I said, What is this crap? Im not going to watch this. I really thought it was some happy little crap cartoon.
Kenn: [laughs] Exactly, exactly.
DRE: It wasnt until I caught it on TV that I realized how sick it was. Have you ever gotten much hate mail from parents who watch it with their kids because they think its sweet and cute and then get upset when they see what it really is?
Kenn: Oh yeah, all the time. Those kinds of letters and emails are my favorite. They write in and theyre so passionate and angry. They tell us, Oh, how could you do this? You guys are terrible people. Please stop. They would ask us how we got an internet license and all this stuff.
DRE: [laughs] Internet license?
Kenn: I know. I remember distinctly this one letter some woman wrote us. Im paraphrasing, I would rather put my son in front of a four way intersection before letting him watch Happy Tree Friends.
DRE: Thats messed up.
Kenn: Exactly and its ironic. It is like, Whats wrong with this picture? It really strikes a chord with people. But its all done tongue in cheek and we always say, No real animals were harmed and they come back every time just like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. I always tell people that our cartoon is just as violent as all those early Warner Bros. stuff. We just kick it to the next level with showing the blood and the guts and what would really happen if an anvil fell on your head.
DRE: I know that since you guys created the show online. Do you guys still own it?
Kenn: Mondo Media still retains all the rights for Happy Tree Friends.
DRE: Are you Mondo?
Kenn: Well, I work for Mondo. Id love to say I am Mondo but I am not.
DRE: Where does Happy Tree Friends show now?
Kenn: Right now, I think theyre still on G4. I dont think theyve finished airing a full season yet. They might have taken a hiatus. Im not really sure what the scheduling is but the half hours are still on G4 and we show some of them online too. But weve been working on the half hours so much that we havent been able to make shorts. After doing all the big half hour shows I want to go back to our roots and make some more internet shorts. But maybe next year well do some more of those shorter ones for the internet. But you can go to the Happy Tree Friends website and watch all the episodes. It is also on MTV in places like Germany and Latin America.
DRE: Have you found that its very popular overseas?
Kenn: It is. Its actually way more popular overseas than it is here, which is a little strange.
DRE: But isnt that cool at the same time?
Kenn: Yeah, thats totally cool. I love it. That is a byproduct of not having a language for the show. We didnt plan for it but it really helped us internationally. Not having the characters speak was borne out of me and Rhodes laziness. When we used to work on other shows, we would see how the directors would struggle on their scripts and never get them right. We were like, When we do a show lets not have any dialogue. When we did Happy Tree Friends we didnt have any dialogue, we just had them squeaking and screaming and stuff like that. That alone has really helped us internationally. We have so much cool product outside of the US that will never make it here.
DRE: How did the Happy Tree Friends get sold overseas?
Kenn: I think they just found it through the internet. The beauty of the internet is that it goes wherever there is an internet connection. Once we started rolling out the DVDs and all this stuff we found licensers who wanted to license the DVDs overseas. I think our biggest boost overseas was when MTV picked it up in Asia and Europe. They used them as bumpers before commercials and that started a big groundswell reaction.
DRE: I know youre a comic book fan; do you want to do Happy Tree Friends comics?
Kenn: Oh man, that opportunity came about a few years ago but we werent sure how to tackle it. Rhode and I are huge comic book fans. I go every Wednesday to pick up my weekly fix. But we didnt want to just come out with a comic book version of Happy Tree Friends.
DRE: Yeah, most comic books based on cartoons suck.
Kenn: We were trying to think What can we do to give this a little bit more of a twist something to make it a uniquely Happy Tree. But it stalled a little bit. Id love to revisit that someday if we have some time.
DRE: There must be a Happy Tree Friends videogame coming soon.
Kenn: We are in the really early process of working up an Xbox live arcade game. Were trying to shoot for release early next year but it all depends. There are so many moving parts on that. Im a huge gamer too so Im psyched.
DRE: How did Happy Tree Friends end up being featured in The Good Girl [directed by Miguel Arteta]?
Kenn: It was the same thing. There was a producer or manager or somebody from their side that was a really big fan of the show. They had the scene theyre getting high and watching TV. One of the guys here said, When you see Happy Tree Friends in one of those scenes its always shorthand for the fall of Western civilization. [laughs]
DRE: Do you feel like Happy Tree Friends has gotten more complex over the years?
Kenn: The half hour ones are definitely more complex. When we were first told that we were going to do half hours, I was like, Whoa, I dont even know if thats possible without any dialogue. It took us a few months and we had to go retool everything. Theyre supposed to be really simple but the underlying stuff behind Happy Tree Friends is surprisingly complex. Sometimes it is really hard to get your ideas across, especially if theres no dialogue. Also since these little characters are running around with these really stumpy arms and legs, you cant get the cleanest poses or the cleanest emotions out of them. So theres a little bit of a struggle there. I remember there were certain really good concepts that we had to kill because it was like, Oh thats never going to come across. Thats the obstacle that we always have to come up against. Sometimes we find really funny and challenging ways to come up with it, but for the most part we just try to keep it simple so that even if you have the sound off you can see whats going on.
DRE: Do you think youll ever give them voices?
Kenn: Well, they have voices.
DRE: Well, you know what I mean, with words.
Kenn: No, I think thats part of the charm. Again when we were trying to retool the half hour we were like, Well, should we start letting them talk? Years ago there was a Tom & Jerry movie and they actually talked
DRE: That sucked.
Kenn: Yeah, exactly. It sucked.
DRE: When they made Aeon Flux talk, that sucked too.
Kenn: Right, so again it was like, Oh she was much cooler when she didnt talk.
So the show works right now so we dont want to break that unless theres some really funny gag that we can do for it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
Excellent interview, Dan. *thumbs up*
-TM
i love it!!