‘Animals’ cuts the cute, but remains wildly kooky

Those who can never get enough of adorable animated fauna like Mickey Mouse, Nemo or Bambi may not be ready for “Animals,” the animated series premiering on HBO on Friday, Feb. 5.

You like cute little mice with big ears and big eyes? How about disgusting street rats with social adjustment issues?

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Are you a cat person? Maybe you’ll change your mind after two spoiled house cats trap a feral alley cat and threaten to disembowel him.

Remember Jiminy Cricket? Meet his distant relatives Phil and Mike, a couple of chatty body lice who are so pleased that their new home includes a food source.

Those are some of the characters brought to hilariously revolting life by Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano in “Animals.” They’ve not only created this crazy good series, they also supply the voices and the character names — the lead characters are always Phil and Mike, regardless of species.

“Rats” is about a pair of rodents who go to a party where they hope to persuade a female rat to “make babies.” One of the guys is outgoing and a chick-rat magnet. The other is a social misfit who’s never “made babies.” The superstud offers his pal a little blue pill. He’s got a whole bunch of them, which he found in a box. If he could read, he would have seen that the box was labeled “Rat Poison.”

In another episode, imaginatively labeled “Pigeons,” a street bird named Phil awakes one morning to discover an “egg” in his nest, causing him to question his gender identity. Why, he’s going to be a mommy pigeon! Yes, the egg is oddly shaped and has a lot of dimples in it, but that just means the baby pigeon will have cute dimples too. There’s a kind of mark on the side of the egg, like a swooshing check mark. That must mean the egg passed inspection.

Phil is ready to transition to his true gender, dressing accordingly (despite the fact that other pigeons suffice with feathers) and toting his/her pending offspring around in a plastic bag.

The series, which is produced by Mark and Jay Duplass (“Togetherness”) is subtitled “Unexpected Tales of Urban Life,” which sounds way more highfalutin than the series is. The animation is intentionally rough, with the pigeons, rats, horses, dogs and body lice set against photographed urban settings.

You won’t hear any squeaky or cutely exaggerated voices in “Animals,” just Phil and Mike chatting in an intentional monotone like a couple of everyday New York guys trying to figure out how to adjust to the complicated, ever-changing social landscape.

But the deadpan approach only enhances the delicious off-the-wall comedy of “Animals.” The series is batty and brilliant as it turns the whole notion of anthropomorphic cartoon animals on its fuzzy ear.

Walt Disney would be turning over in his cryonic preservation unit, if that urban legend hadn’t been debunked.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV Follow me on Facebook

Animals: Animated comedy. 8:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 5, on HBO.