Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Netflix’s new animated series Big Mouth is the kind of show you’re amazed exists at all. Not that Nick Kroll and John Mulaney were able to get an animated series off the ground, that makes sense. But that they put together an animated series about pubescent tweens who are going through big, scary, gross hormonal changes, and then having the show be about those big, scary, gross hormonal changes. In which those hormonal changes are personified as raging monsters of id. And in which we see animated children’s genitals, some of which carry on conversations.
It’s a patently insane concept, and it doesn’t always work, but it mostly does, and when it does, it is very funny and often poignant. Kroll, Mulaney, Jessi Klein, Jason Mantzoukas, and Jenny Slate play the central five characters, classmates and friends driven to hormonal extremes and trying to figure out how to handle these new thoughts and altered bodies. It’s something that literally everybody goes through, but it’s also a perspective that’s rare enough in popular culture that it feels like science fiction.
Which is probably why the show that Big Mouth most often reminds me of is MTV’s late, lamented Clone High. The short-lived animated series featured a premise that was outlandish, yes, but tunefully easy to get across. See, way way back in the 1980s…
The series, created by the team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who would go on to do the 21 Jump Street movies before being kicked off of the Han Solo movie, followed the teen-drama adventures of Abe Lincoln, Joan of Arc, JFK, Cleopatra, and Gandhi, and while the characters were a couple years older than the Big Mouth kids, the humor comes from them acting like crazed hormonal lunatics who don’t know what they’re doing.
Big Mouth is not as funny as Clone High, which is no shame, because Clone High is one of the funniest animated series ever, but it’s also understandable considering Big Mouth‘s concept lends itself to moments of bittersweet sincerity. Clone High never really had to grapple with its premise in the same way; you never had them reckoning with their existence as clones. It was more a parody of the teen dramas of its era.
Still, though, there’s a streak in Big Mouth that reminds me of Clone High in the best ways. In its eagerness to anthropomorphize objects like pillows and genitals. Or how Jordan Peele voices the ghost of Duke Ellington, easily Big Mouth‘s most Clone High character, who plays as a halfway mark between George Washington Carver and Jane’s jazz-man confidant Toots:
The similarity is also present in the voice cast, which is Big Mouth‘s best asset. The collection of voices spans from top-notch talent like Maya Rudolph to Kroll and Mulaney to writers like Jessi Klein and Paula Pell. Clone High did a similar thing, casting for voices rather than star power. So they got Will Forte before he got famous or TV actresses like Nicole Sullivan and Christa Miller, before nabbing bigger-name talents for guest stars. Casting Kristen Wiig as female genitalia was a stroke of brilliance that called to mind Clone High casting Michael J. Fox as Gandhi’s kidney.
Here’s hoping Big Mouth does better than Clone High‘s single-season fate. We’re better equipped to handle strange animated comedy that’s operating at a higher plane and features tween boys having long-term relationships with pillows they have sex with. One can dream!
