Exploding Kittens is a bizarre and bonkers entry in Netflix’s surprisingly deep bench of animated comedies, and one that utilizes the absurd scope to earn some pretty big laughs. A big part of this comes from the presentation, which balances an epic battle of good and evil through a couple of snippy cats fighting amongst themselves in modern suburbia. A big part of that vibe comes through the scoring, which balances a number of genres but is never afraid to turn a feud between cats into a duel of genuinely epic proportions.
The women behind the score, Jina An and Shirley Song, made sure to bring their unique experience and versatility to the project, which ended up immensely benefiting the comedy. During an interview with TVBrittanyF, Exploding Kittens composers Jina An & Shirley Song discuss their initial reactions to joining the series, the surprises of the first season, and finding the perfect balance between epic scoring and comedic timing.
TVBrittanyF: The two of you have so much experience composing other kinds of projects, but Exploding Kittens is something uniquely bizarre. It’s this big epic conflict between heaven and hell, realized in the form of two cats slapfighting. What was your initial approach to joining the series and how did that change over the course of production?
Shirley Song: Before we even got the job, we were in the pitching process and the demo-ing process. I remember just reading the log line. We’ve obviously played the game, but, you know when, but when they’re saying that they’re going to make a show about this, you’re like, what? You don’t really know what it’s going to be like. This is a card game, it’s such a fun card game. But what type of show are they going to make? But then, when we read even just the logline about how it’s God and devil and they’re going to be turned into cats, that cracked us up. I think just from the log line alone, we knew that we had to do an epic score. It needed the big choirs and those bombastic brass and strings.
Jina An: It’s funny that you mentioned how it’s the two cats slap-fighting but the score itself is serious and epic. I think the showrunners [Matthew Inman & Shane Kosakowski] also really wanted to play that up. A lot of the time, the references were these classical pieces Fortuna that Shirley actually sang growing up.
Shirley: I used to be in choir, so that was a fun thing about the show.
Jina: We’ve got all this choral epicness in it, and then the orchestral to back that up. I think that was our initial approach to it. I think we had an epic battle scene as one of our demos.
Shirley: There’s a huge sort of Armageddon fight scene between Devil Cat and God Cat. That was one of our sort of demo scenes. That was fun.
That actually brings up something I’m curious about in the scoring of Exploding Kittens. The series has these big epic beats that have to feel authentically massive, but they’re also so bombastic in part to play into the comedy of this goofy fight scene. How do you approach a big epic score for Exploding Kittens without undercutting its effectiveness?
Jina: The first thing that comes to mind is the ins and outs of the music, and making sure we’re not playing the music throughout the entire scene. Sometimes when you just abruptly stop, that’s to let the joke land. I think that itself is such a huge important part for the joke to shine. I think we did play around a lot with timing during the scenes. We talked a lot about it during spotting sessions as well. When we review the cut, we’ll often talk about when to stop so that we can hear certain things better. I think the timing is everything.
Shirley: I think in a lot of cases, we also just trusted our instincts. We like to think we have a sense of humor too… I do think we had a sense of that. But I always say, I always think comedy is actually quite difficult to score. I think the funniest things are when it’s played as seriously as possible. Rather than us trying to make you laugh… if this is an epic battle to these characters, the music needs to be coming from their point of view. It needs to be serious.
You’ve both worked on so many different kinds of projects. What would you say is the biggest lesson you brought from the experiences to Exploding Kittens?
Shirley: I think that this is one of the funnest things about composing for Exploding Kittens — I think every episode, we’re going on several adventures, right? It takes us places and the musical genre changes. I mean, one minute where we have this epic music, but then, we’ll have Cajun music. When they’re playing video games, it’s all 8-bit. Or maybe it’s heavy metal, rock, all of that sort of stuff.
I think the fact that we have been able to work on, I don’t think we’ve worked on that many projects, but just that variety helps us. It helps us bring these elements in… it’s like, at this moment we’re going to be playing it like this, so we’re going to add heavy metal. We’re going to add some rock guitars. We’re going to add some rock organs. But Jina and I have also worked on a lot of orchestral music too. That obviously makes the writing go by faster.
Jina: We both met in college at Berklee College of Music. There were just so many amazing musicians from all over the world who would come to Boston to study all these different genres. Like, I play the viola, but one day I’d be at a rehearsal for Dream Theater. When they were on tour, I was in the string session section playing metal scales. Just shredding on the viola. Then the next day, I took my private lesson with this insane jazz violinist, Rob Thomas. And then within the string department, there was also a Boston Symphony orchestra member who taught Viola and was just this insane classical musician.
But also there was a huge American roots program with fiddle, Celtic music, bluegrass, and just everything you can learn. It’s just such a diverse school. We, we literally tapped into these genres within Exploding Kittens. With the metal element, for example, for a lot of the satanic moments. Then in episode 3, they asked for Cajun style. So then, all right, we’re gonna go for banjo and fiddle. I think in one of the episodes they asked for leprechaun Celtic stuff… I think all around, feel like we do have such a unique experience with music that we were able to tap into these different genres. It was pretty smooth, right? I’d say it was always a fun challenge.
What would you say surprised you the most about this experience?
Jina: With each episode, I’d say, you’d think this is limit to what they can do. But then it would just go out of our expectations and get crazier and crazier.
Shirley: We didn’t think we’d be scoring North Canadian dictator music or that we would be fighting bad pugs. Those were definitely surprises. [Laughter]
Jina: I think that was always something to look forward to, because we just never knew what to expect. And not to mention the last episode, which ends on such a cliffhanger. We were just super excited, hopefully, about what’s to come next?
Shirley: I think the other surprise also is just how collaborative the entire team was. Have to give a huge shout-out to Matthew and Shane for being incredible showrunners and having great ideas all the time, and just being able to really trust us…. it was honestly the funnest thing we’ve ever worked on. Not just because of how funny the show is, but just how great the team was. That’s always a surprising factor too — I didn’t think I was going to have this much fun. I knew it was going to be fun, but not this much fun. And a huge part of it was thanks to the team.
Jina: I think every time we would end a Zoom with them, we would text each other and be just like, ‘Oh, man, I love these guys.’ Like, we just kind of fall in love with them, every single spotting session. Part of the reason we were able to go full out with the score was because they gave us the green light to run with it. They would be like, ‘Hey, I trust you guys with this scene. Just do your magic.’ And they would give insane, clever ideas throughout… all these references and ideas that they would give us, it’s the kind of things that we would never have thought of. But then we’ll try it out musically, and then we’re like, oh, wow, that was, that was just genius, you know? They were fantastic.
Exploding Kittens is now streaming on Netflix
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