“You can never out-weird nature. There’s so much cool stuff going on down there once you look.”

That’s how co-creator Sunil Hall teases the new DreamWorks animated series The Mighty Ones, which debuts this Monday November 9th on Hulu and Peacock. Hall co-created this comedy with Lynne Naylor. It’s about four tiny talking nature creatures, Rocksy, Twig, Leaf and Very Berry, who live in the yard of a couple humans. They have some fun, unique adventures in the grass.

Hall was inspired by his childhood. “Definitely growing up, me and my brother lived in our backyard and we created these worlds where we dig a whole for a mouse and pretend a mouse is in it – and do all these adventures. Children have this ability to go out and make these universes with very simple ingredients and we kind of wanted to do that with our show.”

Naylor loved this idea: “What if you’re really, really small and everything’s much, much bigger than you?” And she admires the quirkiness of the characters. “These guys are kind of innocent. They’re dysfunctional. They’re not really smart. They’re interpreting everything in the world that’s larger than them. When you do have something fall into the yard, you get a lot of comedy within the misunderstandings and challenges that they face.”

One of the main reasons The Mighty Ones works is the “natural” chemistry between the ‘core four’. Hall says at least two or three of the voice actors were able to record their dialogue together in each session. “We really wanted to create a group dynamic that would make writing stories easy. Once we nailed down their relationship, we could put them in any situation and just play out their character choices that direct the story. And in casting them… we looked for those same traits in the actors. They brought a lot of realism to the characters.”

Naylor describes the show as “character-driven”, and Hall says the story and the dialogue are “pretty fluid” at several stages of the show-making process. As for the animation, Naylor says, “We wanted this fantastical world that really felt a different place than just above the ground with all the human characters. We wanted to create this look that would inspire… our artists and give them something fun. We wanted a really cool, irreverent vibe for the show. We wanted it to be a little raw.”

“It’s tough to stage a green leaf against green grass,” Hall adds. “The characters are kinda flat color, and they’re a little brighter and they pop. Our backgrounds are much more texture and a little darker. I always like that it’s a beautiful squaller. There’s this messiness and sloppiness and sketchiness, but it’s also really rich and vibrant. I like that contrast.”

One of the standout episodes is “Game On!”, in which the gang walks into a human-size board game, which is like a metropolis to them. Naylor believes this episode was “really challenging because we’re creating a world of plastic… against a world that’s completely organic. We wanted the pieces to feel like little cheap pieces of a board game. And also the money. On the interior, we wanted it to look like anything that was pasted on with paper. When they’re small, the challenge when we were developing the look of the show was to get the scale. That came-off really well mainly because of everybody’s input on being aware of the cheesiness of the humor with the game. They’ve never seen a city before. How do they react to this new environment?”

“The Mighty Ones universe is really different from our universe,” Hall explains. “There’s no real communication between them, and they don’t have much knowledge about the human world and human things. But they come across that knowledge accidentally. That’s a great example of them accidentally creating Capitalism [for] their simple existence. It’s fun to do that because it allows us to bring in themes that I think are more interesting to, hopefully, an older audience too. Hopefully parents will enjoy watching it along with their kids.”

For Hall, there’s a key goal with The Mighty Ones. “My parents were pretty restrictive on how much TV [I could watch] and we didn’t have video games. So playing outside and playing board games was a lot of our life. If this show encourages kids to go in their backyard and start playing with leaves and twigs, I think that would be amazing.”

Premiering a series with characters interacting in a backyard environment… during a time when many families may not be venturing beyond their backyards… is something Hall couldn’t have predicted early on in production. “My kids are spending tons of time in our backyard. I feel really lucky. We have a small yard, but I’m lucky that we have one. I think that makes a big difference to be able to go outside at the same place. And to them, it doesn’t feel small. It feels limitless. They can create a pirate fort in two seconds and play for an hour.”

Naylor echoes Hall. “Anybody’s backyard can be anywhere. And for me, it’s all about imagination.”

This is not the first rodeo for The Mighty Ones creators. Hall and Naylor have been a part of some of the biggest animated series of the past few decades, including SpongeBob SquarePants, Ren and Stimpy, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack and South Park. Will TMO reach the status of all those other shows? “There’s something really satisfying about when you’re laughing at your own show even though you’ve seen it a lot,” Naylor says. “I’m turning into a fanboy over it.”

Hall’s perspective: “The media landscape is really different than when those shows became huge, and I don’t know if it’s possible to reach that big of a market anymore. There are a lot more shows being pumped out through different, smaller channels. I don’t think we wanted to do ‘The Next Ren & Stimpy’. That’s an impossible goal to reach, and I don’t think that’s really our focus. But if you create honest characters and make a genuine show that reflects all the people who are making it, there’s a value to that.”