‘Big Mouth’ creators and show EPs Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg, and supervising director Anthony Lioli talk about their new animated adult rom-com about bears, raccoons, and other lovably horny forest creatures dealing with their love lives; debuts May 22 on Netflix.
A raccoon whose mom tried to eat him, a bear whose dream is to date a horse, a deer who can’t get over her wolf ex, and a red fox trying to navigate the lesbian dating sphere. In Mating Season, debuting May 22 on Netflix, every animal has their own problems. They’re all searching for true love, whether from intimates or mothers. Freud would have a field day with this one.
From the creators of Big Mouth and Human Resources, Mating Season is an adult 2D animated romantic comedy set in the animal world, about love, sex, relationships, and the universal need to find a partner and perpetuate the species, starring bears, raccoons, deer, foxes, and a host of other horny, lovable forest critters.
Here’s the trailer:
Executive produced by Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg, and Nick Kroll, the 10 30-minute-episode season features voice performances by Kroll, Zach Woods, June Diane Raphael, and Sabrina Jalees. Chris Prynoski, Shannon Prynoski, Antonio Canobbio, and Ben Kalina also serve as executive producers for Titmouse, with Anthony Lioli serving as supervising director and overseeing all art and animation for the show.
AWN chatted with Levin, Flackett, Goldberg, and Lioli about the show’s risqué content, why some animals didn’t make the cut, and which stories were pulled from their own lives.
Victoria Davis: Coming off Big Mouth and Human Resources, two incredibly successful shows, there was obviously going to be demand for more from your team. Tell me about the origins of this show’s idea. You could have explored dating and relationships in any number of ways, but you chose to set the show in the animal world and marry animal habits with human issues. How come?
Mark Levin: We love to explore the world, the way we live now, and human dynamics, and figure out fun ways to do it in a way that makes animation essential to the stories we’re telling. So instead of just doing a Friends-type show or Sex and the City…
Jennifer Flackett: Which can be live-action.
ML: … we want to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by animation to create these animal worlds and find different ways to portray relationships and sex.
JF: We always felt on Big Mouth that, if you were portraying sex with humans, you really needed to go to metaphor. So, there was a train, or there was figure skating. But sex with animals is funny and not upsetting. And Big Mouth was really about one time of life, from age 13 to 15. We were very interested in exploring the next phase of life, that time when you’re looking for your person. We actually tried a couple of ways to think about it with humans, but with all those ideas there was just no need for it to be animated.
Then we remembered this idea we had for a movie about the mating habits of animals. We were like, ‘Well, that totally does both things.’ We could talk about a copulatory tie and relate it to the human world with people who are afraid of commitment. All the pieces lined up, and we never looked back.
VD: It’s all woven together in a clever way. I think there’s a misconception that shows like this are all sex jokes and expletives, but the writing here is some of the cleverest I’ve seen. And I’m not just saying that because I’m interviewing you. It really is incredible.
JF: Oh, we know, Victoria.
VD: Like The Fox and the Hound callback. That was so funny. And it’s surprisingly educational. I learned more about animals in the first four episodes of this show than I ever did watching Animal Planet.
Andrew Goldberg: We have a whiteboard in our office where one of our PAs gives us an animal fact a day. And some of them are fantastic. We’re like, ‘We’ve got to save these and put a compendium out or something.’
VD: When you’re writing these scripts and weaving together animal facts and clever callbacks, do those pairings come together pretty quickly and organically, since you’ve all worked in comedy for so long? Or is writer’s block still a struggle?
ML: We still have hard days. And we have easy days.
JF: We had our eight seasons of Big Mouth and two seasons of Human Resources. So, by the time we got to Mating Season, the train just worked. But when those things come together, that’s still the best, right? Like with The Fox and the Hound and with Fawn and her wolf boyfriend, who doesn’t want to be tamed.
AG: You have to find the right animal with the right problem. And just wait until people meet Ray’s mom.
VD: Oh, God. Yeah, that’s a deep dive into trauma. I didn’t know raccoons could be driven to eat their own young, but it does make for great writing about parent-child conflict and codependency.
ML: Exactly.
VD: And Anthony, what was it like being on the animation side of a show like this, where you’re exploring these explicit animal relationships visually and showing how different animals - sometimes even different species - have sex?
AG: It was his dream.
JF: Yeah, Anthony’s so lucky.
Anthony Lioli: I do have a lot of fan fiction myself. But it was an interesting journey coming up with the look. When we first started, many moons ago, the characters didn’t have things like kitchens. That came later, when we started exploring how they would cook or make dinner for a date. We looked at Gilligan’s Island a lot.
AG: It’s a little Gilligan’s Island, a little The Flintstones. And the scale of the characters varied a lot.
VD: That’s true. Right at the beginning, you have a squirrel and a moose as a couple. Were there any rules about who could and couldn’t get together in this show?
JF: We decided, on some level, there’s rules and there’s also no rules, because we can break them whenever we want.
AL: When we did the presentation two years ago, we started experimenting with how Ray is a little raccoon and Josh is a giant bear. We needed to figure out how to get them both together in one shot and then somebody pitched the idea of Ray crawling up Josh and hanging out on his shoulder. So that created some new ideas with other animals and how to play with that scale and break some rules.
JF: But you always have to be mindful of the character design.
AG: Yeah, we had one scene initially where Ray and a galago were hooking up. We thought it would be a funny scale thing, but the problem was they had these big eyes and, especially animated, it looked very baby-ish.
JF: After we watched it, I was like, “I think we have a galago problem.” It was disturbing. So, we changed the character from a galago to a possum. Then it was fine.
VD: You can keep this answer wholesome or share an expletive, but what was one of the most fun visuals to see come together on this series?
AL: I was literally thinking of this just this morning, coincidentally. I think it would be the goat weed god illusion.
JF: Scenes like that, even on Big Mouth, we would always call our “animation moments.” They were the scenes where we could really go crazy with the visuals. And we still try to find moments like that in this one, even though the whole world is pretty crazy. Like the mycelium scene. We loved that one.
VD: I was actually really sad when that plant turned out to be evil, because it was so beautiful to look at.
AG: Mushrooms are up to no good canonically.
AL: Yeah, haven’t you seen The Last of Us?
AG: The visual that always sticks out for me is in Episode 4 when Dylan, Fawn’s boyfriend, is peeing all over the place to mark his territory in the apartment and Fawn has that Bambi moment of her slipping on the pee like Bambi on the ice.
VD: The callback to Bambi in the first episode, when they’re talking about him going insane at the funeral, was pretty twisted as well.
JF: That was actually one of the first concepts we pitched for the show. Bambi was always there.
VD: And I’m sure your own lives were as much an inspiration as these Disney characters. What’s one of your favorite moments on the show that was inspired by a true story?
AG: On Big Mouth, we all sat around and talked about the most embarrassing things that happened to us when we were kids. Now, we sit around and talk about the most embarrassing things that have happened to us as adults. To me, it was interesting to see how many people in the room had mommy issues and daddy issues. I guess there’s something about being a comedy writer where you can’t have two functioning parents.
JF: And Fawn trying to be Penelope’s wing-woman but then everyone ends up liking Fawn. That’s so relatable, having that hot friend. And I really related to Fawn and Dylan’s story, having a boyfriend who doesn’t want to adjust or change.
ML: I remember when I bit off that one guy’s penis.
AG: Yeah, but in your case that wasn't an accident.
VD: My last question, since we’ve talked so much about animal facts, is: what was the strangest or most interesting thing you learned about animals while working on this show?
JF: At some point, while we were all working on Episode 9, we were watching a video about how all these frogs come together to spawn. And we knew we needed an episode where all the frogs have an orgy.
ML: Learning about which animals were monogamous and which were polyamorous was interesting and definitely a gateway to figure out stories to tell.
AG: For me, it was learning about geese and their corkscrew genitals. That comes up in Episode 8.
AL: But we don't show it. If it was Big Mouth, we might have shown it.
VD: Anthony, were you disappointed you didn’t get to animate any animal genitalia on this show?
AL: No, no. I’m an adult. I’m mature enough to accept it. Plus, there’s always the next season.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
