Mechanical banana replacement gnome. That sentence makes about as much sense (but is not nearly as funny) as Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It’s appropriate, then, that interviews with its creators, Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, would quickly devolve into comedy bits and surrealist non sequiturs.

Perhaps that’s for the best. Aqua Teen Hunger Force was about anthropomorphic food friends (Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake) who share a house and get into trouble. They kind of have superpowers — the brilliant Frylock can shoot lasers out of his eyes; the adorable Meatwad can turn into an igloo and a hot dog; the obnoxious Master Shake can sort of leak spoiled milkshake liquid from his straw. As such, it’d almost be more ridiculous to conduct a thoughtful and intelligent interview about the show than the one Willis and Maiellaro had with MovieWeb. They spoke about their recent film Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm, which will be streaming on HBO Max beginning February 8th, and will air on Adult Swim on March 12th.
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Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm Reunites the Adult Swim Legends

Willis and Maiellaro are two of the seminal figures in the creation and popularity of Adult Swim, the late-night adult comedy block on Cartoon Network. They worked on the hilarious and wonderfully weird talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast with Adult Swim founder Mike Lazzo, which resulted in spin-offs such as The Brak Show and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. That show sneakily aired its first episode before Adult Swim officially began, and then was part of its very second week in existence. It ran for 11 years and 139 episodes (and one movie) to become Adult Swim’s longest-running show at the time.

Nearly eight years after its cancelation, Aqua Teen is back with a new movie in anticipation of new episodes for a 12th-season revival. Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm finds the gang split up, with Shake and Meatwad living separate homeless lives without assistance from the ever-responsible Frylock, who is working at a massive corporation akin to Amazon, Amazin. Frylock’s genius is noticed by the tech bro CEO of Amazin, (a hybrid of Bezos, Musk, and Branson, played by Peter Serafinowicz). Neil’s Napoleon complex and cruel treatment of his underlings leads to an apocalyptic scenario, and Frylock must not only save his two friends (and their neighbor Carl), but also the world.

Matt Maiellaro on Making a More Structured Aqua Teen Movie

Warner Bros.

Plantasm is surprisingly more traditional in its three-act structure than one would expect from a show with 12-minute episodes and absurdist humor. Sure, the entire thing isn’t taken seriously, and the format is fiddled with thanks to the villainous Mooninites (who seemingly have the remote control and skip portions of the film while taunting the audience). But Plantasm is ultimately pretty straightforward.

Related: Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm: Plot, Cast, Release Date, and Everything Else We Know

“I think that we wanted to make a movie that, if you hadn’t seen the show, that you would be engaged in,” explained Maiellaro. He held a guitar in his lap, wearing sunglasses and a long blond wig, looking like a middle-aged man’s memory of Def Leppard. “Are you laughing at Dave’s hair?” asked Maiellaro. Willis was composed and still, seeming like the straight man in a comedy routine. Maiellaro continued, transitioning from a rare genuine response into the nonsensical norm of the interview:

I felt like we found a very identifiable, organic journey for Frylock. I felt like the first movie was like a fan base movie. We just went crazy with it. In this one, we really put a lot of thought into the journey and the structure, and how to get to that result at the end. And I’m getting all these words from a screenplay book that we just recently read right before we wrote the movie. So the foreshadowing for the obstacles is resolved in the second part of the movie that we made.

Dave Willis Draws from Ancient Myths to Make Cartoons

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“We both got copies of the same screenplay book,” added Willis. “It’s like, You’ve Been Tapped to Make a Movie: How, in 21 Days. And that’s what we both read, and we adhere to the principles of our teacher. We think we made a consistent story that aligns with much of the ancient tales of the ancient Greeks. They’re all just stories. There’s only one story in the world. And we’re telling it the best way possible, with the best movie possible.”

“Every story, whether it’s a cartoon or a great play or a movie,” continued Willis, “every story is — a man kills his father to make love to his mother. In every story. And so we just stuck with that.”

“The Power of Myth,” added Maiellaro, referencing Joseph Campbell’s oft-used structure of ‘the hero’s journey’ and the monomyth in relation to this movie about sentient fast food with superpowers.

“Yeah, I usually turn on the fire and take my shirt off, and just try to pull upon the power of ancient myths,” said Willis.

“And then I’ll stand behind him,” interjected Maiellaro, “and go, ‘Yes! That’s it!’ I put my energy powers into Dave, who’s trying so hard to do it, and it shows on the screen.”

The Animation of Plantasm Takes the Hunger Force to New Levels

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The way they joke about it, Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm carries a long lineage of classical storytelling that extends millennia, all the way back to the Theater of Dionysus. While it may not be Euripides, there actually is a lot more polish and structure to the film, in both form and content. Despite their little subversions, Plantasm mostly plays as a straightforward movie, and looks wonderful to boot. The whole thing seems like an improvement on the first film, or at least a more palatable variation of it.

Related: Funniest Adult Swim Shows, Ranked

“I think we looked back at the first film, and we wanted to do a film with a story. First of all,” said Maiellaro, “we really wanted to change the look of the show and the look of the world in a way that I think is more rich, it’s enhanced. We actually do real animation in this movie. So we didn’t really take anything away from our experience on the first movie. We forgot we made it.”

The look of Plantasm is mostly thanks to Bento Box Atlanta, which helped create some crisp, imaginative animation. “Bento box is amazing,” said Maiellaro. “I was showing them how to use the software, because they’ve never used that before. And once I just took a couple of months with them, they were just going to town.”

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“I remember Maiellaro-ware animation,” added Willis. “You just, you feed the script page into the computer, like a fax machine. And then it literally just makes what you wrote happen, right?”

“Yeah, they’re doing it at Pixar now,” said Maiellaro dryly. “They’re doing whole books.”

“It’s not A.I.,” clarified Willis, though clarification of absurd silliness tends not to elucidate. “It’s not A.I. It’s M-A-I … E-L-L-A-R-O-ware.”

“Yeah,” said Maiellaro, “it’s like lowercase M, uppercase A, uppercase I, and then lowercase for the rest of it. I’ll text it to you, it’s really cool to look at.”

Aqua Teen’s (Non-Existent) Oscar Controversy

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Whatever they did, Plantasm looks great. It’s funny, too, telling a story without compromising any of the gross-out humor, weird sight gags, pop culture references, or sarcastic insults that Aqua Teen fans love. Willis and Maiellaro are certainly proud of it.

“From day one, we wanted to get this film nominated for an Academy Award,” explained Willis (though there is currently no Oscar for Best Performance from Nihilistic Fast Food). “And we hear it still may be.”

“The verdict is still out,” added Maiellaro, despite Riz Ahmed curiously not mentioning Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm when the nominations were announced. “I feel like some of the votes were maybe not counted the way we wanted. We did not get that phone call at five in the morning. We were both up and on Zoom together at five in the morning waiting for the phone call. But I think it was a misprint in The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline, and all the various outlets. But you can report it here first, that we did get nominated. And you can sort of scoop that up.”

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“We think there’s fraud,” said Willis. “Everything we said was totally true. And the movie comes out on HBO Max on February 8th, if you want to relay that as hard as possible.”

“And Adult Swim on March 12th,” added Maiellaro, “if you want to watch it with advertisements, from Shasta and the Marines. It’s peppered with ads from Shasta and the Marines, if you prefer the longer Aqua Teen experience.”

Experience is too tame a word to describe a conversation with Maiellaro and Willis, a word which barely contains the fun to be had with Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm. From Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and produced by Williams Street, Adult Swim, and Bento Box Entertainment, Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm will be available to stream on HBO Max beginning February 8th, and will air on Adult Swim on March 12th.