KEY POINTS:
Kenn Navarro loves killing animals. No quick deaths, either. Even he will admit to the "worst kind" of torture.
Thankfully it's not real.
Navarro is the co-creator and animator of Happy Tree Friends, a 13-episode, half-hour cartoon series screening on C4 (Tuesdays, 9.30pm). Those who have had the pleasure of watching it will know not to do so while eating. The stars are a group of cute, fluffy woodland creatures who become sliced, diced and drained of blood by each episode's end.
When Navarro - no relation to Dave, by the way - gets an idea as to how a character will die, it's known as "a Happy Tree Friends moment". His wife and friends have also been known to chip in with grisly suggestions as to how to cut up Cuddles, gut Sniffles or disembowel Giggles.
"Sometimes you'll just be walking down the street and you'll see something about to happen or some kind of set-up that looks a bit wonky. That's a Happy Tree Friends moment. So it's all around us. Inspiration is derived from everywhere."
The show started as a competitive gag between Navarro and co-creator, Rhode Montijo. During their early days at Mondo Media, an animation studio in San Francisco, they would try to out-do each other in the gross-out stakes to get a laugh. Turned out Mondo were laughing too. The company backed a series of short episodes and sold them to youth channels around the world, including MTV in Europe, the US and South America. An episode appears each month on their website. Because the characters garble nonsense rather than speak, they've become global stars without the need for sub-titles or translation.
Last October, the loveable creatures hit the big time when the three-minute shorts were expanded into half-hour episodes. "I was a little afraid that it wouldn't keep the spirit and the spontaneity and the quickness of the shorts but we were able to expand the comedy and the story a bit more. There's all this time we can set up jokes we couldn't have done before."
The humour comes from the shock of seeing these saccharine creatures, with their buck teeth and Care Bear noses, meeting their maker in such gruesome fashion. First, they must go through a painful comedy of errors, much like Itchy & Scratchy, the show Bart and Lisa watch in The Simpsons, but with a few more sly references to the Loony Tunes formula. Each episode starts in the style of a kids' cartoon and ends with a moral message, such as, "Don't bite off more than you can chew!"
Meanwhile, a cute fluffy bear might trip and fall on to a lollipop, which then dislodges in his eyeball, which then wraps itself around a tree, and so on.
"I personally like all the eye injuries," says Navarro. "I think a lot of people are very sensitive about that. It's great because we like poking fun, if you will."
Not everyone sees it that way. Although the show has yet to receive any official complaints, Navarro gets plenty of hate mail. Which, of course, he loves.
"I always remember this one woman who found out that her son was watching Happy Tree Friends so she blew up at us. She said she'd rather put her kid in a four-way intersection than let him watch it. I'm like, can you see the irony in this?"
Just as ironic is that Navarro is squeamish by nature.
"I can't look at real gore; I just can't look.
"There was one episode where we had an eyeball getting cut in half on screen and it slices in half and I had to draw an inside of an eye. And I have no idea what the middle of an eye looks like so I tried to Google it but as soon as all the little thumbnails came up I couldn't even click on them, I was like, I can't do this, it's too much. So when you watch that episode that eye looks like a grapefruit."
