Why You Should Watch Smiling Friends Right Now: Do It DO IT NOW
Life is hard sometimes. We’re at that point in the semester when the new class excitement wears off and the grind begins. So many things demand our attention, between keeping up good grades, keeping up with friends, and fighting off the impending dread of adult life. Sometimes, you just have to give your brain a break. You have to turn it off and let yourself relax with something absolutely silly. “Smiling Friends,” streaming now on HBO Max, is the perfect show for just that.
“Smiling Friends” revolves around Pim and Charlie, two coworkers at the Smiling Friends company. Their job is to make people smile, taking them everywhere from Simon S. Salty’s greasy fast food restaurant to the Enchanted Forest to Hell. Each 11 minute episode shows the characters helping someone who’s feeling down, whether it be disgraced TV star Mr. Frog, their own giant-headed boss, or a heartbroken shrimp.
There are three kinds of jokes in “Smiling Friends”:
1: Well written, witty jokes
2: Awkwardly drawn-out realistic conversations
3: Guy does funny scream (I am always a sucker for this one)
“Smiling Friends” creators Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack have been making and uploading content to the internet for years. Keeping each episode to 11 minutes was a decision made from their end, as they wanted to trim the fat as much as possible from every script. What’s left is a balancing act between a comedic chaotic frenzy (shrimp does a funny scream, fast-food mascot spits up acid, old man breastfeeds a baby) and weirdly naturalistic conversations that sound like the two voice actors don’t even know their mics are on.
These moments are interspersed with moments that make it obvious that “Smiling Friends” was made by animators. Stop-motion, rotoscoped, 3D, and live action characters all share the screen with the 2D animated main characters.
The show even experiments with different styles of 2D animation. In the Enchanted Forest episode, someone shows up who looks and moves like Bilbo Baggins from the Rankin-Bass animated Hobbit movie (the one that you either loved or were terrified by as a kid). It’s incredible to see how much care went into animating him in a completely different style from everything else in the show. It’s even more incredible when you realize that the entire season has about the same budget as a single episode of “Family Guy”.
If you or someone you know has HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube TV, or any other way to watch “Smiling Friends,” I cannot recommend it enough as a weekend binge watch. At 8 episodes of 11 minutes each, it’s a solid hour and a half of simple, silly fun. And then, when you’re done, you can watch it again because you missed that background joke in episode 3. And then again because you just wanna see that part with DJ Spit again. And then again because you missed that Finn Wolfhard was in episode 1.
