NO INHIBITIONS! The creators of Big Mouth drop a SHOCKING new 18+ animation that goes too far! 🚨🔞

This month, Netflix has a great gift for fans of adult animation and those who are still sad that Big Mouth ended its run after eight seasons. The streamer has delivered Mating Season, a new show created by Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg and Nick Kroll that features a whole new group of lovesick characters with hilarious dilemmas and neurotic obsessions.

The hilarious new offering follows a quartet of critters — a raccoon named Ray (Nick Kroll), a deer named Fawn (June Diane Raphael), a big brown bear named Josh (Zach Woods) and a fox named Penelope (Sabrina Jaleel) — as they look for love and sex in all the wrong places.

“We liked exploring the next phase of life after Big Mouth … Now, we wanted to capture what it’s like to be trying to find your person and hooking up during that time of life.”

— Writer-producer Jennifer Flackett

The list of guest stars for the show is also mind-boggling, with actors like Sarah Silverman, Abbi Jacobson, Vanessa Bayer, Aidy Bryant, Jason Alexander, Carlos Alazraqui, David Duchovny, Pamela Adlon, Timothy Olyphant, Maria Bamford, Mark Duplass, Matt Rogers, Clancy Brown and Andrew Rannells lending their voices to a wide variety of animal pals.

In a recent interview with Animation Magazine, the show creators (collectively known as Brutus Pink) discussed the making of their clever new project.

Wild in the Woods

“We actually began thinking about this new venture during the final seasons of Big Mouth,” says Goldberg. “It has been so much fun to keep our crew together and work with our favorite collaborators, like our supervising director Anthony Lioi.”

Goldberg recalls that initially they considered doing a movie about mating rituals. “But then we realized that there were so many stories to be told in this animal world, so we decided to present it as our next possible series to Netflix,” he says.

“We liked exploring the next phase of life after Big Mouth,” says Flackett. “Now, we wanted to capture what it’s like to be trying to find your person and hooking up during that time of life. There was no reason to do that for people in animation. It could just be a live-action show. But with animals as the central characters, we could really capture those things in a really great way.”

Levin mentions that the show’s stellar voice cast mostly consists of actors and comedians they were friends with and had worked with before. “We really created the main characters with those actors in mind, and wrote them with Nick, Zach, Sabrina and June in mind.”

Just like Big Mouth, Mating Season is produced by Burbank- and Vancouver-based animation powerhouse Titmouse. Korean studios Yearim and Yeson, which also contributed to the previous series, are also helping out with the animation production. “They help us take our boards and animatics through color and animation, and then it comes back to our team, and we polish it up and finish it here,” says Goldberg. “Those studios, and especially Titmouse, have been our amazing core partners for all these years.”

“The animation team for the new series was a mix of both old and new people,” says Lioi. “What’s great [is] that we had this machine built for Big Mouth for 10 years, so we were able to hit the ground sprinting. Season 1 of Mating Season was a lot like the eighth season of Big Mouth. For example, our lead character designer was Jim Feeley, who has been working with us for years and was really helpful in evolving these characters.”

Goldberg says it’s fun to tell human stories with a wildlife spin and to embed animal jokes in very relatable plotlines. “So we can tell a story about a wolf who’s moving in with his girlfriend, and it’s about the challenge for a wild animal to be domesticated,” says the producer. “So here’s a metaphor about life and about moving into a relationship, and at the same time, it works on an animal level and a human level. We find that very exciting.”

“With the animation, I think it’s fun when they go back and forth between being humans and animals,” adds Levin. “I think of the first episode, when the two older bucks charge each other, they’re in an argument, but their version of putting their dukes up is like pawing at the ground and saying, ‘Guys, please don’t charge!’”

To prep for the show, the team watched hours of nature documentaries for inspiration and to get some of the details right. “We find those shows endlessly inspiring,” says Flackett. “Every time we watch them with our writing staff, we discover something we can use. For example, we learned a lot from this documentary about how all these frogs come together and spawn. We also saw this great video about copulatory tie. We love our animal facts!”

Levin says he finds it fascinating when animal behavior reminds him of how humans act. “The thing that I find so compelling is when these animals feel like humans,” he notes. “You watch this mother bears with her two cubs, and you realize those kids are such pains the ass, just like human kids! Of course, David Attenborough is the gold standard, and the photography of these nature films is incredible. I found myself very inspired by Life on Our Planet, which is the Netflix show narrated by Morgan Freeman and tracks the major extinctions on Earth over time.”

Flackett mentions that just like Big Mouth, the new show is writer-driven. “We write our scripts, then do a table read, rewrite them and then record them like a radio play,” she explains. “That’s our last draft before we launch the storyboards. We really want to make sure we don’t waste our animators’ time or pencils. We learned that over time. So, we don’t want to give them something that we don’t feel really strong about. Then, they take it over, and we look at the animatics and rewrite that again. We have a lot of bites at the apple to make it better and better.”

The show’s backdrop is a deserted campground, perhaps in New England or upstate New York, and we don’t see any humans in this world. “There’s no electricity or plumbing here,” explains Flackett. “We were thinking of how they did it in shows like Gilligan’s Island or The Flintstones. The animals have some stuff from the human world, and every once in a while, you might see someone’s legs, but that’s really about it. The point was that something could feel like a kitchen or a bathroom, but it had to look really rough.”

Ups and Downs

When asked about his take on the state of animation, Levin responds, “We have lived through a lot of different phases in the animation business. During the pandemic, there was a giant boom, and everybody was trying to take their scripts and turn them into animation. But today, we’re seeing so much consolidation across the business, and there are less shows in production. However, we are seeing animation expanding into a lot of different genres. It used to be just adult animation, but today the definition of what an animated show can be about is getting broader. We know that we’re very lucky that we’re able to tell these great, funny stories and keep making adult animation. I know that it is hard for a lot of people to find new opportunities, so we don’t take it for granted at all.”

“We just hope that Mating Season makes audiences laugh and feel something at the same time,” concludes Flackett. “We really try to make our shows emotional as well as funny. I hope that the show also makes people care.”