Angry Birds Toons
Angry Birds Toons is a Finnish short-form animated television series based on Rovio's Angry Birds franchise. The series follows the adventures of the birds as they struggle to guard their eggs against the pigs, who want to steal them for their king to eat, as well as adventures from within each group. Episodes were released weekly from 2013 to 2016.
Episodes
Characters
Birds
- Red is a temperamental desert cardinal and the leader of the flock. He is bossy, strict and poor at stress and anger management, and is perhaps the most dedicated to protecting the Eggs from being captured by the Pigs, but he is mostly calm and spends time with the flock.
- Chuck is a yellow Atlantic canary triangular-shaped bird who can move incredibly fast, to the point of even slowing down time. He is incredibly arrogant, narcissistic, dumb, and even possesses a hero complex at times, though he does have the flock's best interest at heart. He frequently causes problems for everyone around him due to his need to be in the spotlight.
- Bomb is a black loon with a "fuse" on top of his head and can cause explosions at will. He is laid-back, well-mannered and has an active imagination. He often plays an older brother or fatherly figure to the Blues.
- The Blues are a trio of eastern bluebirds who are mischievous and fun-loving, pulling pranks on both the Pigs and the Birds. They're the youngest in the flock. Their names are Jay, Jake, and Jim.
- Matilda is a white chicken with rosy cheeks that serves as the mother figure of the group. A stereotypical hippy bird, she loves nature and is always seeking peaceful solutions to problems, but is prone to getting angry when things don't go as planned. She enjoys cooking, performing fine arts such as a saxophonist, an opera singer, and a gardener among other skills.
- Terence is a large, dark crimson desert cardinal with a permanent grumpy appearance. He prefers to be silent and quiet, only growling and grunting for communicating, rarely makes eye contact, and never blinks. He normally moves around by disappearing and reappearing elsewhere only when other characters are not looking at him. His immense weight and stonewall personality are comically worked into the episodes' plots.
- Bubbles is a small, inflatable, orange spot-breasted oriole that only makes an appearance in the series of Halloween-themed episodes. Like The Blues, he is mischievous and fun-loving, but sweet and energized. He has a one-track mind on acquiring more and more candy. He is also the only bird who doesn't appear with the rest of the flock.
Pigs
- Corporal Pig is a militaristic pig who wears a helmet with an ace of spades playing card. He reveres King Pig and likes to bully others and order the minion pigs around. According to his Angry Birds profile, he had accidentally glued his tin helmet to his scalp, though a couple of episodes show that it can be removed.
- Foreman Pig is a pig with a bright ochre-orange moustache and a vision-less eye who is in charge as a construction engineer. He occasionally leads the charge for stealing the birds' eggs when Corporal Pig isn't doing so.
- King Pig is a large pig who is the ruler of Piggy Island. He is gluttonous, lazy, stupid, immature, and selfish. His ego is also very fragile, often behaving like a spoiled child when things don't go his way. A running gag in the show is that his palace is constantly being reduced to rubble by the various antics of both the birds and pigs.
- Chef Pig is a pig with a chef hat and a French moustache who cooks for the King and frequently helps with egg vandalism. He is incredibly devious and will act against even the other pigs, including the king, if it suits him.
- Minion Pigs are the pigs who dutifully serve the King, although they would prefer to just have dumb fun. As a group, they are a competent and reliable workforce, having constructed an entire city for their kind, in stark contrast to the live-on-the-land lifestyle of the birds.
- Professor Pig is an intelligent pig with square-lensed glasses and grey eyebrows, he owns a science lab in a house he shares with Foreman Pig, in the lab he runs multiple scientific experiments, but most of the time Foreman Pig changes the experiments into schemes for egg-stealing.
- El Porkador is one of the Fat Pigs, he is used by Corporal Pig to intimidate the birds, due to his size and strength; but he is not used very commonly as he lacks agility.
Production
The series was made available worldwide on Angry Birds apps via Toons.TV, selected video-on-demand services, and select smart TVs.
Reception
Angry Birds Toons received positive reviews from critics and audiences. Emily Ashby of Common Sense Media gave a show four stars out of five, saying "this gem of a series that doesn't overextend itself beyond the limits of the games themselves." In his review of volumes 1 and 2 of season 1 DVD release, Michael Zupan of DVD Talk praised the series' characters, animation, and humor. He also described it as "witty, hilarious and highly reminiscent of the days when we used to watch Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry."Home media
is the home media distributor for the series. While the first season got a Blu-ray release, later releases starting with season two were only available on DVD.Specials
On 21 October 2011, before the series started, Rovio made a Halloween special as the trailer for the Angry Birds Seasons episode of Ham'o'ween, and as the backstory of how the bird Bubbles joined the flock of birds; later in the same year, Nickelodeon showed Angry Birds: Wreck the Halls, a Christmas special that aired on 17 December 2011, and which was included as a bonus feature on the Season 1, Volume 1 DVD; on 20 January of the next year, Nickelodeon showed Angry Birds: Year of the Dragon, a special celebrating the Chinese Year Of The Dragon, and the Angry Birds Seasons episode of the same name; and Angry Birds Space, an animated prequel to the video game of the same name in March 2012.Book adaptation
On January 1, 2016, Rovio and Kaiken Entertainment Ltd published a series of 4 books written by Les Spink called Angry Birds Toons Tales. The books contained more in-depth written versions of the first twelve episodes of the series, although the visuals shown in the books are the same as the visuals which appear in the animated versions of the episodes.Spin-offs
''Piggy Tales''
On 11 April 2014, Rovio released a series titled Piggy Tales on their multi-platform broadcasting channel, Toons.TV, with the first episode called "Trampoline". The series show the minion pigs' life, with other exclusive characters to appear in various episodes, but no other pigs or birds were featured.The first two seasons used claymation-style CGI to depict the pigs as they appeared in most Angry Birds games, with the latter two seasons shifting to complete computer-generated imagery and focusing on the pigs as they appeared as in The Angry Birds Movie.