Here
are some of the people from the Mondo Media production house who make
-- or allow to escape -- the Happy Tree Fiends, uh, Friends series of
Flash animation. The two-minute shorts are among the most
ruthlesslessly violent films ever made. Imagine Tom and Jerry cartoons
with a level of gore that surpasses Fist of the North Star, and you
still don't get the full impact of Happy Tree Friends. The shorts are
loaded with the sort of cynical action that appeals to a jaded
collection of Internet viewers, and they've become popular enough to
justify a DVD release. Unfortunately, some people see only the cute,
pastel cartoon animals and think it's a made-for-children show, when
it's hard enough for some adults to stomach. "I think there's no real
logic to it," said Kenn Navarro, one of the series' artists. "The
nugget of the idea was cute things going really terribly wrong. It
seemed the more over the top we went it got funnier -- compounding
injury on top of injury and running over it with a Mack truck. You start
with this cute and innocent thing and end with the walls red with
blood. In the middle there's some comedy."
Some
people who don't understand Happy Tree Friends is a parody write nasty
letters to Mondo Media complaining about the blood and guts.
Ironically, even the series' creators are squeamish about real-world
violence. Navarro referred to an episode that features some explicit
eyeball-slicing for which he had to research what a split eye would
look like. He did some Web search on eyes, but couldn't stand the sight
of the images of real dissected eyeballs. So when the Tree Friends
episode ran, it looked more like a grapefruit than an eye. Another part
of the series' animation technique, also intended to elicit groans from
an audience, are the sound effects. When a character needed to break a
leg, the producers went to a plant nursery, bought bamboo and
experimented with that so they got the most convincing sound. But the
key to making the series possible is Macromedia Flash, the program in
which all of the animation is created. The producers said Flash makes
it possible to create an episode in weeks instead of months.
Here
are some of the people from the Mondo Media production house who make
-- or allow to escape -- the Happy Tree Fiends, uh, Friends series of
Flash animation. The two-minute shorts are among the most
ruthlesslessly violent films ever made. Imagine Tom and Jerry cartoons
with a level of gore that surpasses Fist of the North Star, and you
still don't get the full impact of Happy Tree Friends. The shorts are
loaded with the sort of cynical action that appeals to a jaded
collection of Internet viewers, and they've become popular enough to
justify a DVD release. Unfortunately, some people see only the cute,
pastel cartoon animals and think it's a made-for-children show, when
it's hard enough for some adults to stomach. "I think there's no real
logic to it," said Kenn Navarro, one of the series' artists. "The
nugget of the idea was cute things going really terribly wrong. It
seemed the more over the top we went it got funnier -- compounding
injury on top of injury and running over it with a Mack truck. You start
with this cute and innocent thing and end with the walls red with
blood. In the middle there's some comedy."
Some
people who don't understand Happy Tree Friends is a parody write nasty
letters to Mondo Media complaining about the blood and guts.
Ironically, even the series' creators are squeamish about real-world
violence. Navarro referred to an episode that features some explicit
eyeball-slicing for which he had to research what a split eye would
look like. He did some Web search on eyes, but couldn't stand the sight
of the images of real dissected eyeballs. So when the Tree Friends
episode ran, it looked more like a grapefruit than an eye. Another part
of the series' animation technique, also intended to elicit groans from
an audience, are the sound effects. When a character needed to break a
leg, the producers went to a plant nursery, bought bamboo and
experimented with that so they got the most convincing sound. But the
key to making the series possible is Macromedia Flash, the program in
which all of the animation is created. The producers said Flash makes
it possible to create an episode in weeks instead of months.
