‘Animals’: The Story Behind HBO’s Twisted, NSFW Adult Cartoon
You can do whatever you want in the sewers,” Animals co-creator Phil Matarese says. “When we’re making episodes about rats, you can tell loose, crazy stories. You can tell a really fucked-up story about a rat hiding his boner from a girl, but it’s mostly about this kid who just likes a girl a lot.”
“The boner is his heart,” executive producer Mark Duplass counters matter-of-factly.
“The boner is his heart,” Matarese rejoins, laughing. “He’s got a heart boner.”
Ever since the animated series premiered on HBO earlier this month, it’s presented a comically perverse look at the animal kingdom. Rats throw orgiastic parties. Cats dress in bondage gear. Canadian geese pretend they’re swans for a chance to screw the prettier bird. Meanwhile, humans come off as mumbling savages.The whole thing, which indie-film firebrand Duplass produces with his brother Jay, would play out like a Ralph-Bakshi fever dream were it not for its improvisational feel.
Matarese and Duplass are seated at a table eating breakfast with the former’s foil, co-creator Mike Luciano, in an enclave high atop the HBO building in Manhattan. When the trio talks, it’s like witnessing a live episode of the show, all deadpan dry humor and frequent tangents – about the band 311, about filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors Trilogy, about the eggs they’re eating – that lead them all to burst into laughter. None of them are afraid to digress if it means getting a laugh.
It’s the sort of environment that has made it so that they could welcome the imaginations of special guests on the show: Jessica Chastain, Aziz Ansari, Jon Lovitz, and countless others. It’s an unpredictable, stream-of-consciousness endeavor, and the creators say it’s been that way from the start.
The show began with pigeons. Matarese and Luciano were working at a New York City advertising agency, creating branded content for Vans, Google and Nissan, when they found themselves distracted by the birds outside their SoHo office window. “We were bored,” says Matarese. “We started riffing, looking at these pigeons between projects, and then we decided to riff directly into GarageBand.”
After playing around with Final Cut – “You could kind of fake animation with it,” Matarese says – the pair made a short. “A lot of people in our office liked it,” he recalls, so they screened it for others and found a manager who introduced them to filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, who were just beginning to dip their toes into TV production with HBO’s relationship dramedy Togetherness.
“We’d been talking for a little while about trying to make a TV show independently, using the same format we did for independent film,” Duplass says. “I made them this pitch: ‘We’ll make the whole first season super cheap, and then we’ll take it out and sell it. Even if we don’t, I’m sure we can find an online TV channel that can at least give us our money back.'”
The duo accepted Duplass’ suggestion and upended their lives, moving to a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles where they converted one of the sleeping quarters into a sound booth, so they could record their routines. “It was an avenue down total creative control,” Luciano says. “It was a way for us to keep going without figuring out the mystifying process of bringing it to a network and developing it there.”