Happy Tree Friends

Happy Tree Friends (commonly abbreviated as HTF) is an adult animated web series created by Aubrey Ankrum, Rhode Montijo, and Kenn Navarro, and developed by Montijo, Navarro, and Warren Graff for Mondo Media. Disguised as a children's cartoon, the series follows the misadventures of cute anthropomorphic forest animals, who live initially peaceful lives until they are killed or injured in sudden, usually accidental, graphically violent incidents. Debuting sometime in 2000, Happy Tree Friends has achieved a cult following on Mondo's website and YouTube channel and expanded into a multimedia franchise, which includes the television series of the same name.
While working with 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.
Although the first episodes of Happy Tree Friends were produced in 1999, it debuted online sometime in 2000 and 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:
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 was "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 computer. In January 2017, Kenn Navarro tweeted "As I understand, sales were OK but fell below what was expected."
It was announced on August 17, 2023, that a new Happy Tree Friends episode would be released on September 27 to tie into the downloadable content for the shoot 'em up video game The Crackpet Show (titled The Crackpet Show: Happy Tree Friends Edition), which was released on the same day. On October 18, 2024, a new episode titled "Happy Train Friends" was released as a crossover with Dumb Ways to Die.
Happy Tree Friends centers on the lives of anthropomorphic, multicolored woodland animals. It intentionally misleads first-time viewers into thinking it is a children's animated edutainment series, with the show's regular opening and closing sequences being in the form of the Little Golden Books, and all main characters (except Lumpy and Sniffles) sharing a Care Bears-esque design (pie-eyes, heart-shaped noses, mitten hands, and boot-shaped feet). Each episode starts peacefully with the characters living their lives normally, with activities ranging from childish to grown-up, but a sudden event unintentionally (sometimes intentionally) caused by another animal leads to many of the characters being subjected to very extreme and cruel graphic violence. Each character has suffered brutal pain, murder, or mutilation by the end of each episode, but always returns alive and well by the next.
A total of 132 segments have been released across ninety-three web episodes and the thirteen episodes (39 segments) of the television 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. 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.
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.
The series has drawn criticism due to concern that children would be influenced by its violent content due to the series appearing as if it were made for children. An example of this happened in 2005, when American author and journalist Katherine Ellison expressed her feelings about it to The Washington Post after witnessing her six-year-old son watch it. She believed that the series should be regulated since she felt it would have an impact on young children's minds.
The series has also been controversial with several local and federal government agencies in Russia. In 2008, the Russian Media Culture Protection Department (Rossvyazokhrankultura), a regulatory body for TV in Russia, issued a warning to Russian TV channel 2×2 about them airing the series along with The Adventures of Big Jeff, claiming that they both promote "violence and brutality." This "violence and brutality" was claimed to harm the psychic health, moral development, and social morality of children, all of this being a violation of the license agreement. The department warned 2×2 to remove them in order to avoid legal issues. The owners of 2×2 voiced their disagreement but reluctantly fulfilled the request. Later on, in 2021, the Oktyabrsky District Court in Saint Petersburg banned the series along with some films based on anime, claiming that the series "contains elements of cruelty" and that it "is designed in a style common for American animation" and that "watching the animated series undoubtedly harms young children's spiritual and moral education and development and contradicts the humanistic nature of upbringing inherent in Russia."
Fall Out Boy's 2007 music video for their song "The Carpal Tunnel of Love" was directed by Kenn Navarro and stars characters from the series. The band members also make a cameo as animated characters.
A video game titled Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm was released on June 25, 2008. It was developed by Stainless Games and Sega for Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360 and the PC. There was also an iOS game titled Happy Tree Friends: Deadeye Derby, released in 2014.
On August 17, 2023, Mondo Media and Ravenage Ltd. announced a crossover between Mondo's Happy Tree Friends franchise and Ravenage's shoot em' up video game The Crackpet Show as a downloadable expansion on the latter. Such expansion is titled The Crackpet Show: Happy Tree Friends Edition and was released on September 27 for the Steam, GOG.com, and Epic Games Store digital distribution services, as well as the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch gaming consoles.
A spin-off series called Ka-Pow! aired in September 2008 and is an anthology of action-oriented stories starring The Mole, Flippy, Splendid, and Buddhist Monkey. A total of six episodes have been produced.
In 2014, Kenn Navarro created D_Void, a show similar to Happy Tree Friends; only 2 episodes had been produced for the series. The 2 episodes of D_Void were later uploaded to the Mondo Media YouTube channel in the summer of 2020.