Happy Tree Friends

Happy Tree Friends is an adult American animated web series created by Aubrey Ankrum, Rhode Montijo, and Kenn Navarro, and developed by Montijo, Navarro, and Jeremy Viet Duong for Mondo Media. The show had achieved a cult following on Mondo Media, G4 and YouTube. Montijo, Navarro, Graff, Ankrum serving as showrunners.

Being an adult animated show disguised as a kids cartoon show, the series features cartoon anthropomorphic forest animals, who are suddenly subjected to very extreme graphic violence in every episode. Each episode revolves around the characters enduring accidental or deliberately inflicted pain, murder or mutilation.

History
While working on Mondo Media, Rhode Montijo drew a character on a piece of scrap paper who would later become Shifty. He then drew a yellow rabbit that bore some resemblance to Cuddles, writing "Resistance is futile" underneath it on a spreadsheet poster. Rhode hung the drawing up in his workstation so other people could see his idea, and eventually the idea was pitched to and accepted by the Mondo Media executives. In 1999, Mondo gave Aubrey Ankrum, Rhode Montijo, and Kenn Navarro a chance to do a short for them. They came up with a short named "Banjo Frenzy", which featured a dinosaur (an earlier version of Lumpy) killing three woodland animals, a squirrel, a rabbit, and a beaver (earlier versions of Giggles, Cuddles, and Toothy) with a banjo. From there, Mondo gave them their own Internet series, which they named Happy Tree Friends.

After its internet debut in 1999, Happy Tree Friends became an unexpected success, getting over 15 million hits each month along with screenings at film festivals.

Mondo Media CEO John Evershed attributes the success of the series to animator Kenn Navarro. "He had a clear vision for that show and he's just a brilliant animator. He has created something that is pretty universal. I envision kids watching Happy Tree Friends 20 or 30 years from now the same way that they watch Tom and Jerry now. So really it's Kenn Navarro."

In 2014, after the episode "Dream Job" was released, Mondo Media announced plans to produce a feature film based on the series, but in 2016, Kenn Navarro tweeted that he was unaware of work being done on a film, but that his team were "in talk to do more shorts". Later, when a fan asked Kenn Navarro about the film, he replied: ""a treatment that [I] and the writers did was all the work (that [I] know of) for the movie."

Throughout December 2016, Mondo Media released five all-new episodes for purchase online. Bundled as a set named "Happy Tree Friends: Still Alive", the episodes came with some additional bonus material such as background designs, animated storyboards, the animation process, and a writer's session video. Upon purchase, the buyer was allowed to download the DRM free video files to their own computer. In January 2017, Kenn Navarro tweeted "As I understand, sales were OK but fell below what was expected.

Premise
Happy Tree Friends is a parody of children's television shows (e.g. The Smurfs, The Get Along Gang). All the characters are anthropomorphic mammals, they all (with the exception of Lumpy, Sniffles, and Buddhist Monkey) have two front buck teeth and pink heart-shaped noses. In early episodes, most characters played the roles of children playing childish games. However, as the series progressed, the age concept was dropped, and now characters act variously like children, teenagers, and adults in different episodes. The only characters who are unaffected by this concept are Pop and Cub, who always act like an adult and a child respectively, and characters whose roles usually are not affected by age, such as Splendid or Cro-Marmot.

At the beginning of each episode, the characters are typically found in everyday situations. However, these situations always escalate into violence, and the inevitable deaths of those involved and/or "innocent" bystanders, mostly because of very unfortunate, surprising accidents with otherwise harmless instruments. Some of the characters have mental illnesses, like Flippy, who has post-traumatic stress disorder from a war and will become a killer in certain situations (such as when eating a piece a cake that inflates Flaky makes her quills pop the balloons, which sounds like gunfire to him in the television episode "Party Animal").

The show's characters sometimes appear not to notice others' deaths or injuries, despite clear indications (such as blood coming out of their mouths), or they seem to overcome their deaths (save for the web episode "Happy Trails Pt. 2," in which several funerals are held, and the first few are taken seriously). Most characters always reincarnate for the next episode.

Each episode starts with introduction credits resembling a children's book, which portrays the show's logo, the episode title (which is usually a pun), and the cast – and ends with an iris shot, followed by the end credits, where a moral is shown at the very end. Internet episodes have a typical duration of a maximum of four minutes. Usually only a few of the characters are used in a single episode, but occasionally longer episodes have been released in which most of the characters appear (and in one case, the entire cast [with the exception of the Buddhist Monkey, Lammy, and Mr. Pickles] have appeared). Television episodes last about half an hour, having three segments of about seven minutes each.

Television series
Main article: Happy Tree Friends (TV series)

The television series was first shown at Comic-Con 2006, while some of the episodes were shown on the website a few weeks prior to the show's television premiere.[citation needed] The television series would premiere on September 25, 2006 at midnight on G4's late-night block, Barbed Wire Biscuit (later renamed Midnight Spank). The web series also aired on the network's animation anthology series; Happy Tree Friends and Friends and G4's Late Night Peepshow.[citation needed]

The Canadian channel Razer (now MTV2) aired the show in syndication with then-sibling television network Citytv, and then OLN. Internationally, the series was broadcast on MTV in Europe and Latin America, and Animax in South Africa.