Mo Willems’s image books typically characteristic dedicated nonconformists — not the human type, however the animal selection. Over the final twenty years, he has invented a pigeon that’s decided to drive a bus, a pig that wishes to fly and a cookie-baking dinosaur that doesn’t care that she’s extinct. Now, one in every of Willems’s most gently adventurous creatures is about to shed its inhibitions on tv.
That intrepid soul is Wilbur, the toothy protagonist of “Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed: The Underground Rock Experience,” a particular that begins streaming on HBO Max on Thursday. (It will air on Cartoon Network subsequent yr.) A rock opera for households, this animated comedy hinges on Wilbur’s discovery of tiny clothes floating down like manna — or relatively males’s put on — from heaven, and the scandal that follows his fast evolution from bare mole rat to natty garments horse.
The tv particular adapts not solely Willems’s 2009 greatest vendor, “Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed,” but additionally “Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed: The Rock Experience,” a stage musical model that debuted in 2018 and remains to be enjoying in theaters. But in any leisure incarnation, this oddball species, whose hairlessness is just one of its uncommon attributes, doesn’t have to fret about equally themed competitors.
“It’s the same thing with a pigeon,” Willems, who lives in Northampton, Mass., mentioned in a cellphone interview. “Nobody wants to make a book about a dirty urban bird. So that territory is yours, right? Everybody else is doing sloppy bunnies and happy bears.”
So, he added, “I love the idea that is so outrageous that it becomes sublime.”
Having begun as an Emmy-winning author and animator for “Sesame Street,” Willems, 54, is now one in every of his technology’s most acclaimed youngsters’s authors and illustrators, together with his papers archived at Yale and two solo museum retrospectives to his credit score. Admirers evaluate him to titans like Dr. Seuss and Willems’s personal idol, Charles M. Schulz. (Willems drew “Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed” with a nib from one in every of Schulz’s pens, given to him by the cartoonist’s widow, Jeannie Schulz.)
In Willems’s work, “you have the sweetness of Fred Rogers and you have the hilarity of Dr. Seuss,” Amy Friedman, the top of programming for Cartoon Network and HBO Max Kids & Family, mentioned in a cellphone interview. But, she added: “He doesn’t need to be somebody else. He’s just Mo.”
Friedman’s group wished to embrace that singular imaginative and prescient when it approached Willems about working collectively. Although HBO Max already streams short films primarily based on Willems’s work and “Don’t Let the Pigeon Do Storytime!,” a live-action sketch comedy particular, “Naked Mole Rat” is each their first inventive collaboration and the primary hourlong animated tv manufacturing that one in every of his books has impressed.
As Willems defined it, “Naked Mole Rat” explores themes — self-acceptance, tolerance, celebrating others’ passions — that relate on to his personal expertise, each as a cartooning-obsessed youngster of Dutch immigrants and because the guardian of a 21-year-old son, Trix, who’s transgender. This isn’t, he emphasised, “a coming-out story” — though Wilbur shocks his friends by revealing his fashion-forward wishes — however an “accepting-in story,” he mentioned.
“The people around Wilbur, the mole rats around Wilbur, have to do the work,” Willems mentioned. In the TV particular, the plot is as a lot about how Wilbur’s greatest buddies — they’re in a band with him referred to as the Mole-ing Stones — grapple with Wilbur’s new id as it’s about his personal self-discovery.
And grapple they do, at peak quantity and emotion. Anyone who’s conversant in youngsters’s tv is aware of {that a} rock opera is about as frequent as a unadorned mole rat in a purple tuxedo. But Deborah Wicks La Puma, the composer for “Naked Mole Rat” — the stage and TV variations have the identical songs — shares Willems’s enthusiasm for full-on, arena-style, headbanging tunes.
The story “is a little subversive,” La Puma mentioned in a cellphone dialog. And rock, she added, is “just a little more edgy, but totally fun and full of energy.”
This power fills the tv adaptation, which makes use of new preparations, background music (by the composer Keith Horn), extra musicians and a forged with a vocal vary “that allowed us to make the music more intense,” Willems mentioned.
That depth can also be a part of the humor. Jordan Fisher, an alumnus of the Broadway casts of “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” who voices Wilbur, mentioned he used the lilting vocal patterns of a household good friend’s 11-year-old to develop Wilbur’s speech, which “is kind of affable and goofy,” Fisher famous. But when this nearly cherubic cartoon rat sings, he added, it’s as if “Aerosmith is seeping out.”
Willems, who wrote all of the stage and TV lyrics, acknowledges that younger viewers received’t know bands like Aerosmith or the musical numbers’ different influences, which embrace the Who, Heart, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Queen. But that doesn’t trouble the reveals’ creators.
“One of the things that we talked about,” La Puma mentioned, was, “‘How can this be kind of a fun rock primer for kids?’”
The TV particular may additionally operate as an amusing primer on artwork historical past. In one scene, Wilbur’s bandmates drag him into the Moleseum of Art, an enormous, Met-like establishment, to show that no self-respecting mole rat has ever worn garments. Here, an array of masterpieces, together with the Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” all with bare mole rats as topics, come to life digitally to precise their displeasure.
The thought was, “‘How do we turn these songs into music videos?’” mentioned the animator, author and producer identified professionally as Mr. Warburton. (Tom in personal life, he enjoys the formal title as a result of, he mentioned on the cellphone, “it sounds so official, and I’m so not official.”) With onstage actors, he added, the visible choices are restricted, however in an animated music video, the sartorially inexperienced Wilbur can handle to sing and dance whereas first placing on a button-down shirt backward and a lilac-colored fedora the wrong way up.
Mr. Warburton, who wrote the TV script with Willems and is, like him, an government producer of the particular, additionally labored with Oddbot Animation to create an enormous, computer-generated subterranean colony of three-dimensional mole rats — this, in any case, is the “Underground Rock Experience” and never simply “the Rock Experience” — that also resemble the creatures in Willems’s unique drawings.
“We wanted to have them sort of look like little puppets,” Mr. Warburton mentioned. Whereas computer-generated imagery steadily seems “super smooth,” he added, the digital results listed here are nearly like that of stop-motion animation.
In translating the unique materials to tv, the boys, who’re longtime associates, additionally made one scientific correction: The mole rat society is now matriarchal, led not by a grand-pah however a grand-mah, voiced by the venerable actress Carol Kane. They have additionally answered a longstanding query: What is the supply of that floating style that so tantalizes Wilbur? (The reply is a spoiler, so no clues right here.)
But maybe most necessary, they’ve given the venture sufficient sophistication — it has a working joke about oxymorons — to make it an all-ages viewing expertise, though it’s premiering as a part of Cartoonito, HBO Max and Cartoon Network’s preschool programming block.
Willems mentioned he hoped it will encourage not solely household dance events but additionally household conversations about artwork, music and id. “I would love it if this special sparked kids to see themselves differently and to act on it,” he mentioned.
“Whatever that is: ‘I like to draw,’ ‘I like to dress up,’ ‘I like to dance,’” he continued. “To be able to take whatever their definition that they had before” and, he mentioned, “add one new one, one exciting new piece of who they are.”
