Now, Kelly's breaking into the mainstream, so to speak. Although his brand of weird, horror-tinged comedy has been a mainstay on Adult Swim for decades, his first theatrical film, Buddy, is hitting theaters following a successful premiere at SXSW earlier this year. The movie, which is about children who are unknowingly trapped inside the world of a forgotten Barney-like television show starring a secretly sinister orange unicorn, is arguably one of the most normal things Kelly has made—which is saying something.
At no point in making Buddy was Kelly deliberately trying to tone the twisted-ness down. "I really just try to do things that I like that interest me," he explains, noting that it's been pointed out that he seems to be very interested in being trapped. This feels appropriate, given our conversation about breaking containment. "If you like Too Many Cooks, this is me exploring some of those ideas of weaponized nostalgia and being trapped in a TV show, on a bigger scale."
Delaney Quinn, Tristan Borders, Madison Skyy Polan, and Cristin Milioti —Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films
The idea of a dark, twisted Barney—a subgenre Kelly calls mascot horror—isn't new, with Five Nights at Freddy's being the biggest modern example. Kids have been cracking anti-Barney jokes, like singing "I hate you/you hate me" to parody the purple dinosaur's loving message, for decades. Kelly says his own children knew the song, a version of which is a plot point in Buddy, from more or less the moment they first learned about Barney. "It made me wonder why he is hated, and interrogate that."
Between the relevant themes and the emotional arc, there is, in Kelly's own admission, a bit more going on in Buddy than in Too Many Cooks — and most of Kelly's earlier work, too. This includes Adult Swim shows like Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell and his two previous, non-theatrical movies, Yule Log and its sequel. (These last two Adult Swim films, which begin as normal footage of a fire in a fireplace before spiraling out of control into a meta-textual narrative about murder, time travel, and aliens, are feature-length but not exactly mainstream popcorn fare.)
"I feel elder, but I don't know if I feel like a statesman," says Kelly, who somewhat sheepishly describes himself as "safely Gen X." "I'm kind of breaking in late. I could learn from them as easily as they could learn from me." Though clearly well-versed with the world wide web, Kelly hasn't made much content specifically for the internet. He also doesn't quite see himself as a classical media man, at home in the more-established TV and movie fields.
Buddy in Buddy —Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films
Still, making a movie for movie theaters—one of the most traditional forms of mass entertainment—feels very overdue for Kelly. When Too Many Cooks became a sensation, it opened up a lot of doors for him. He had already created two Adult Swim shows and written for many other cartoons when Too Many Cooks came out, but it was the viral short that got him meetings.
Kelly hopes Buddy is a containment-breaking success so that he can make more movies. But he doesn't want to think too much about where he fits into the future of horror cinema, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Kelly isn't just a horror filmmaker. Buddy, like Too Many Cooks before it, is funny.
"If this happened, what would happen next?" he asks. And with Kelly, sometimes the thing that happens next is a big friendly-looking unicorn going on a murderous rampage. "Then I let the comedy and horror come in as it may."
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