I must confess I'm a huge smiling friends fan. I tend not to watch modern animation, specially adult oriented shows because they tend to move torwards a nihilistic and atheistic message that gets boring real quick.

Smiling Friends was a huge surprise, it does not try to preach anything, they just try to be funny , which is so rare these days.

What drew me to the show was how open the creators, Zach Hadel and Michael Cussack, are about the processes of financing, writing, producing, publishing and airing the episodes.

They have a** small team**, on a small budget - compared to other shows - and people tend to do more than one stuff.

So in essence:

Is it the future of animation? Is there still space for multimillion dolar seasons once small teams can produce animation as good or - as it seems to be the case - better than bigger studios with a fraction of the budget? All those new grounds animators could be waiting to work on new stuff, they just need to be scouted.