A Cat Exorcism Partially Inspired the Netflix Series ‘Exploding Kittens’

When it came to adapting his popular board game card game into the 2D animated series “Exploding Kittens” (currently streaming on Netflix), Matthew Inman found inspiration in an old girlfriend’s schizophrenic cat, who became so creepy that a priest was called in to exorcise the demons. The premise became the ultimate battle between good and evil when God (Tom Ellis) and the Devil (Sasheer Zamata) are both fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity, trapped in the bodies of two chubby house cats.

While Godcat is tasked with uplifting a dysfunctional family through empathy, Devilcat, his next-door neighbor, causes trouble as the destructive antichrist. “When I was paired with [executive producers] Mike Giudice and Greg Daniels [of ‘King of the Hill’]everything came together and worked,” Inman told IndieWire.

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“Some of [family] the dynamics that we wanted to avoid were things that we’re all a little tired of,” he added. “Like every single teenager on earth who gets picked on and then bitten by a radioactive spider, and then all of a sudden their nose bleeds and they can cut people in half.”

But Inman’s talents as a unique cartoonist (he describes his characters as “bloated, sallow, obese”) required a complementary writer, so he collaborated with Shane Kosakowski (“Teenage Bounty Hunters”) on the scripts as co-showrunners.

“We took some tropes that we thought were funny and tried to bend them to their ears a little bit,” Kosakowski told IndieWire. “That’s why the mom, Abby [Suzy Nakamura]is this Navy SEAL veteran and father, Marv [Mark Proksch]is this dorky board gamer who is about to turn 50 and still wears sandals with socks and still plays “Dungeons and Dragons.” We thought it was interesting that the son, Travis [Kenny Yates]He was a different type of player, and they couldn’t communicate that to each other.”

The hardest part for Inman was adjusting to the world of animation, where collaboration became more complicated. The front end was done by Netflix, and the animation was completed at Jam Filled (Season 2 of “Clone High”) in Canada. “All of a sudden you add actors, and movement, and sound design, and score, and there are all these other elements that are not in your control, where the comedy can change, or just lose some steam,” Inman said.

“So the challenge was to make sure that we cast funny people and not actual celebrities,” he continued. “And to have a strong involvement in the recording and also a strong involvement in the animatics to make sure that the visual gags worked, to make sure that the jokes were effective.”

Inman’s Favorite Line: In the pilot episode, Godcat says to Marv in a hesitant voice, “You sound like a dagger on Benadryl.”

In the pilot, God is portrayed as a slow-warming idiot who warms up to his feline body and helps the family overcome their lack of communication by banding together to kill monsters in a game. From there, he gets even more savage with the introduction of Devilcat, who continues to undermine Godcat, even after he continues to act as a friendly father figure.

“You have the Godcat universe, where he’s a terrible god and he’s not good at being nice, and then we had this idea of ​​Satan being nice,” Inman said. “That would be evil, where I would imagine the River Styx. You have Satan walking up and down this buffet of tortured people, and his daughter is just handing out Gatorade to everyone to make sure everyone’s cool and comfortable. And we thought, ‘That’s a funny idea of ​​her.’ Hopefully the dynamic will be complex because of all the beings in the entire universe, they’re the only two who kind of understand what the other is going through.”

One of the most significant moments in the nine-episode series is Episode 5 (“No Regrets”), in which the family goes back in time and revisits their most uncomfortable moment. “That was an episode that really allowed us to get into Abby’s backstory in a very elegant way, I thought,” Kosakowski said. “What keeps her going and what she wanted out of life and where she is now. And that whole sequence with her and Greta [her amateur entomologist daughter, Ally Maki] in Northern Canada, for me, was the most important in terms of character storytelling, allowing her daughter to see this window into her mother’s life.

“And, at the same time, get this really beautiful father-son story, where [Travis] he’s hurt by this embarrassing moment of being bullied, and his dad reveals this thing that he’s been hiding all these years. And there’s this really important lesson that there’s always going to be bullies in your life, and it’s about how you respond to them and not letting them get the best of you. I mean, there’s a lot of funny bits in there (a high-speed moose chase), but I thought it was an important episode to reveal what our characters are feeling.”

“Exploding Kittens” is now streaming on Netflix.

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