Happy Tree Friends is an American adult 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 has achieved a cult following on Mondo Media, G4 and YouTube. Montijo, Navarro, Graff, Ankrum serving as showrunners. Being an adult show disguised as a children's show, the series features cartoon anthropomorphic forest animals. The show is best known for its episodes starting out peacefully with the animals living life as normal, 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 episode revolves around the characters enduring accidental or deliberately inflicted pain, murder or mutilation. Background History 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. 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