The big mouth spinoff cartoon about just the creatures has some of the most original world building in a TV show so it's kind of unfortunate that it's so very unpleasant looking and that 20% of it is repetitive sex jokes. There's truly nothing wrong with sex jokes but they end up demonstrating that you can't really come up with enough new, different sex jokes to fill 20% of any TV show.
Do you want to know the most interesting creature concepts so you don't have to watch it? Do you want to make me do a monster review out of the fucking
big mouth universe
I don’t think I have it in me to do this as a full blown bogleech.com article but as a tumblr thread, sure, so for starters let me try to explain the setting that as near as I can tell happened kind of by accident:
So Big Mouth - god the character design style is ugly - is a raunchy grossout adult comedy about kids going through puberty and figuring out sexuality. That actually isn’t as horrible as it sounds, I’ve only seen some of it now but it’s written more like a legit sex ed program, exploring health issues and the importance of consent and things like that, sneakily disguised as a Family Guy clone. It’s still really gross though, like toilet humor gross, and the character design style alone weirds me out. I don’t know what it is....is it the pink lips on everything? Anyway, the kid’s hormones and sexual thoughts are represented by these hairy horny monsters, and they were obviously meant to be pure symbolism, but it seems like the writers got too attached to them as characters to leave them canonically imaginary and they became literal real entities that get assigned to humans kind of like guardian angels. At some point various other entities were introduced like a Depression Cat and Lovebugs.
How the human characters experience this reality is extremely ambiguous, they recognize their creatures by name, the converse with them out loud and all humans have them, but they also don’t see other people’s creatures, they don’t notice other people talking to their creatures, and they never mention their creatures to one another. I don’t know what this means for their literal angel-like existence, except maybe you don’t remember them between interactions with them? You only remember the emotion they were connected to?
So this all obviously became a whole lot bigger of a concept than just a background gag to a sex comedy and they made a two-season series set in the “human resources department” where these beings actually come from, turning that background element of a sex comedy into what is technically one of the most original settings in a cartoon. The only thing I can think of that comes close is Pixar’s Inside Out, and that didn’t expand its ideas anywhere near as much. So again it is a real shame that this all looks like an even worse Family Guy and so much of its dialog is like they just leave the same ten observations about ballsacks on rotation. I will say it's not all bad, though; just as much of the writing is actually more serious drama and some heartfelt storytelling about some heavy real-life topics. Just explaining what the fuck this is has taken enough time that I’m gonna have to “review” the “creatures” in another reblog later. There actually are a few with clever ideas to them and even a couple that break away enough from its usual aesthetic that they look cool and/or cute. I said a couple.
Okay here’s the best (relatively speaking) creatures:
Chakra: the first episode briefly shows another, different realm populated by spiritual concepts, and the Chakra is depicted as this curvy, vaporous protozoan looking figure with pure white eyes. She’s the only design I’ve ever seen in this "universe” that’s outright pretty, and she’s also just a really cool looking alien thing, but she’s never seen again after she helps one of the monsters through his emotional problems. She does this by reaching into his literal heart with an ectoplasmic pseudopod, which forces him to confess his true feelings to himself.
José: José is a timid panicky office assistant who gets into terrible mishaps as a running gag. His species and purpose is never given but he looks like a big blue spider and is therefore one of the most tolerable designs. He would look a bit better if his fangs were actually on his chelicerae where they belong, but instead the fangs are on his cheeks, leaving the chelicerae looking like a weird elongated chipmunk muzzle.
Empathy: apparently Empathy is an anthropomorphic lady owl in a suit characterized like a corporate sensitivity trainer. They don’t do a lot with her but I felt like some of you would like this design.
Lovebugs/Hateworms: Lovebugs are positively hideous puke-yellow human faced butterfly people in charge of love, but they can turn into giant snakes called Hateworms (Hatewyrms?) and vice-versa so that’s interesting at least. They do a fairly creative episode that jumps back and forth between two timelines in which the same character is either a lovebug or hateworm, but it’s actually in the lovebug timeline that she accidentally gets all the other main characters killed, forcing the series to stick with her hate form.
General Malice: the leader of all hateworms and boss of the Hate Department is a nazi-coded lizard woman who of course thinks hate is the superior human emotion. I bring her up mainly because the aforementioned Hateworm character becomes her second in command before realizing it’s actually hatred that she hates the most, or something like that, so she kills General Malice, saves the world and turns back into a Lovebug. But wait...isn’t it hate that just saved the day??? Hate is what just killed that nazi! Hate rocks! I think they should have had her stay a Hateworm, become the new boss of Hate Department and put it to more constructive use, like you know hating and killing even more nazis! There are clearly things in life that need to be hated! They even acknowledge this in an earlier episode when that same Hateworm helps a human recognize that she's being discriminated against, in fact! A final scene almost makes it look like they dismantle the entire hate department forever.........what the fuck does that mean for Earth?! They just don’t elaborate. What about how much the average person “hates” getting hurt, or hurting others? Can’t it be said humans “hate” touching fire or “hate” starving to death, for instance? WHAT HAVE THEY DONE.
Need Demons: these represent basic drives for things like food or sleep, and apparently don’t manifest often past your infancy because those aren’t complex enough feelings to require the guidance of any special entity, but a big loud need demon is portrayed for a newborn baby and a withered, weakened little need demon manifests for the mother. These are animated as blobs of blurry abstract color with crude, shaky black outlines and simple cartoon faces that look way better than the rest of the show’s style.
Anthony Pinata: Anthony Pinata looks like Strong Sad from Homestar Runner made out of plasticy tardigrade-like segments, with a gas mask and a party hat. He doesn’t talk and there’s no explanation for what he is, but he works in the Hate Department and his job is to "pop" employees who get out of line, squeezing their heads until they burst. He gets tricked into popping his own head, but it doesn’t kill him and he just spends the rest of the series with a gory headless neck stump. I always like this type of character who exists to be a disturbing enigma and he’s top quality as far as those go, actually maybe the funniest gag in the show? Just this awful, looming, heavily breathing thing coming to "pop" you and oh that's just Anthony Pinata and that's just what Anthony Pinata does. Obviously.
Miscellaneous Hate Department Creatures: I really like the eyestalk slime that looks like an orange version of the meteor from Billy and Mandy, and this hovering veiny cyst with teeth that looks like a relative of the brain alien from Courage the Cowardly Dog (my tumblr icon) but we only see them in the background.
Tony: viruses are sapient germ people in the emotion creature realm, and making supernatural entities sick is just their job. Tony causes a workplace epidemic for an episode and makes an interesting antagonist because he’s simultaneously a diabolical bastard who encourages selfish disease-spreading behaviors (some clear jabs at covid deniers) but just a nice guy with a job to do, and so friendly about it that his hosts don’t take any of it personally and act like he’s just another friend. That’s until one character gets fed up and sanitizes the keyboard he lives in, forcing him to watch his whole family die.
Tito! This is actually the best one Tito the anxiety mosquito looks like a bad pesticide mascot in a good way. She has that terrible human mouth but it’s really balanced out by her huge eyeballs, crooked proboscis and pathetic chihuahua-like proportions. She’s “the” Anxiety Mosquito because instead of a whole species of individuals, she just infinitely multiplies and all of her copies are Tito. In Human Resources she’s a neutral side character who can be harmful or helpful, since at least a little anxiety can be what drives someone to make an essential choice. It turned out she has a bigger role as a straight up villain in Big Mouth so I went and watched her key episodes and they culminate in an interesting bit where we see the inside of a character’s mind, and Tito manifests there as a city-destroying kaiju. Do all the “entities” have additional forms in their human’s mental scapes? I don’t know. I don’t intend to watch enough of the rest of Big Mouth to see if that ever comes up again. They licensed Mosquito by the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs as Tito’s theme song.
Petra: Petra is an “ambition gremlin” and as such her kind is responsible for both extreme good and evil throughout history (though if a client goes far enough, the “job” has to be turned over to Hate department) and is also the boss of the main cast. As basically just a business lady gremlin she’s another of the more bearable designs, but I also include her because I want to mention the best plotline I think this show did in any episode: some of her employees are “stuck” on an “assignment” that only involved a little preschool kid who really, really wanted a toy truck, and Petra can’t believe they’re failing something so small until she decides to do it herself out of frustration. The problem turns out to be that he’s a nonverbal autistic child and none of the adults in his life have even noticed that he just has his own ways of communicating his feelings. Petra is infuriated that they haven’t tried to “learn his language” and takes his situation as seriously as she presumably would any other job until she helps him figure out some signals within his natural limits that his parents are finally able to piece together. I can’t say I expected this cartoon to be the first one I’d ever see with a story from this perspective. I think this covers everything I found appealing? This honestly had the makings of a great scifi/fantasy show if you cut some of the stupider plotlines and gave it better visuals. I wish it were puppets. If the same show were done with puppets it might have been so charming I wouldn’t even care about the worse written moments.
