You’ve been transported to a sunny, pastel-drenched clearing in the middle of the forest. Nearby, a cross-eyed blue moose named Lumpy propels a merry-go-round. The carousel contains three Technicolor pieces of candy that masquerade as cutesy woodland creatures: Toothy the squirrel, Cuddles the bunny and Giggles the bear. Lumpy decides to spin the others faster and faster, their ear-to-ear grins whipping violently in the wind.
Suddenly, disaster strikes: Toothy loses his grip on the carousel and flies away, permanently disrupting this delicious pastoral scene. You see a tree, notice a scream getting closer and – *splat!* – momentum and inertia rule the day as Toothy’s purple cadaver slams smack into the tree. As he slowly slides down the blood-drenched tree trunk, all that remains of Toothy are two buckteeth, firmly planted in the bark.
Back on the carousel from hell, Giggles grasps the bar with the Jaws of Life, all too aware that she’ll be the next to go. This cotton candy fluff of a bear, with her big Bambi eyes and darling pink bow, watches in horror as the bar snaps and sends her into the stratosphere. A freshly sliced tree stump cuts her in half. Moments later, the bar follows, harpooning her chest. You stare, dazed, into her empty, lifeless eyes. You notice her spine is exposed.
Cuddles, a lemon colored bunny with a warm smile, tears through the wind, quietly praying for survival. Then, in a bone crunching snap, Cuddles shoots off – his arm rips away above the wrist – into the whirling engine of an airplane. He ends up a mess of blood-and-guts puree that coats half the airplane.
Meanwhile, Lumpy stops to take a break, wheezing with exhaustion from the merry-go-round spinning in which he and the gang have indulged. Glancing down, he notices Cuddles’ hands, which, dripping blood, still grip the bar. Lumpy shoves his hooves into his pockets and, with an acute understanding of the wrong he has done, starts whistling and hurries off.
Welcome to “Spin Fun Knowin’ You,” the first episode in the whimsically demented, storybook-gone-bad universe of the *Happy Tree Friends*.
The brainchild of Rhode Montijo and Aubrey Ankrum, *Happy Tree Friends* started as one-minute cartoons released on the Internet (www.happytreefriends.com) and snowballed into an underground phenomenon. After gaining a slow but steady audience, the series is now a runaway breakout and has been collected on a DVD that features the episodes and plenty of tasty extras.
The series charts the goings-on in the spare, candy-coated world of the Happy Tree Friends, a gang of hapless cuties who fall victim to the violent, bloody hand of Fate time and again. In this animated nightmare vision of a world where the only constant is random bloodshed, the laughs are hard-hitting and *always* coupled with a wince.
Fear not, though: *Happy Tree Friends* is *not* “Wile E. Coyote, Redux.” Though the bursts of breathtaking violence – like Cuddles’ severed hands or Giggle’s impalement by the bar – certainly shock and amuse the viewer, the smaller moments, the hidden glimpses into the humanity of each Happy Tree Friend, are what truly make these cartoon shorts fresh and exhilarating. We experience a quiet blush of guilt as Lumpy walks off, striking a pose of nonchalance to veil the severity of the massacre. We gasp as Splendid the Flying Squirrel (in “Helping Helps”) presents the recently beheaded Giggles – her new head replaced by an oversized acorn with a hastily drawn-on face – to her weeping mother, who beams with joy at the sight of her recovered daughter. The scene ends with a fountain of bright red blood drenching Mom, who sports a pathetic perma-grin.
The wallop of the cartoon’s punch lies in its ability to violate the viewer’s expectations. Each episode opens with the screaming voices of children that sound like they have yet to be diagnosed for ADD and ends with a saccharine message like “If friends were flowers, I’d pick you” and “Smiles are always free.”
Kenn Navarro, the animation director for the series, explained the deliberately misleading look of the cartoon to the Muse. He stated, “The look in particular was heavily influenced by those old Goldenbook-Mary Blair storybooks that we all grew up with. What Rhode and I wanted was to make it kind of deceptive, where everything else around the show is cute and very storybook-y. Then watching it, it just hits you upside the head. You don’t know where it’s coming from.”
As the episodes unfold on the DVD, you can witness the maturation of the minds behind the world of the *Happy Tree Friends*. In episodes like “Stayin’ Alive” (which features the sidesplitting moves of Disco Bear) and “Treasure These Idol Moments” (a disturbing episode that features a cursed, tragedy-inducing idol and produces as much psychological horror as an episode of “The Twilight Zone”), the bizarre world of the Happy Tree Friends opens up to new characters and endless possibilities.
The DVD also opens up the *Happy Tree Friends* to many previously unavailable opportunities. The series may have flourished on the internet, but the collection allows for added features – like the not-to-be-missed “Corn Pop Video,” a parody of VH1’s “Pop-Up Video” series that gives the behind-the-scenes details on the “making” of “Spin Fun Knowin’ You.”
The creative team behind the cartoon shorts plans to release one new episode a month, via the Internet, and plans on a second DVD release sometime later in the year. Undecided about the future, which may include full-length *Happy Tree Friends* cartoons or even exposure on networks like Comedy Central or Cartoon Network, Navarro remarked on his only current ambition: “Rhode and I are trying to build a rocketship. We’re gonna leave this planet. Maybe the Martians will understand us.”
While the show might have its fare share detractors (i.e. angry parents, conservatives, cartoon purists), Navarro and Montijo will not be exiting the planet anytime soon. Navarro believes that the series has a devoted audience and that the creative team has hit a stride in the creation of the series (a trip to his younger brother’s school, where the kids looked up at him with “these big eyes,” proved the success and impact of the show to an elated Navarro).
These days, Navarro and *his* gang of Happy Tree Friends are happily riding the crests of small, steady successes and aren’t too worried about the future. He simply makes one request of future *Happy Tree Friends* fans: “Maybe one dollar from each of your readers will help us build a better ship.”
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