Cartoon Forum Booms – Variety

Welcoming 80 pitch projects, hosting 537 companies and recording a 13% increase in new entrants, this year’s Cartoon Forum saw the European animation scene booming. With 292 buyers on site, the Toulouse event organized three days of very popular television presentations from September 19 to 22. Here are five key takeaways from the event.

Buzz and presence

The cheeky French short form “The Hall of Fail” came up time and time again as Cartoon Forum attendees talked about the 2D project that gives an affectionate raspberry to story adventurers. The dystopian YA adventure “The Tern” was another major eye-catcher, cited as much for its narrative ambition as for its elaborate sci-fi design. Still, if the older skewed projects got people talking, preschool pricing got them buying — or at least getting the biggest share of buyers in the field. Projects ‘Tiger and Bear’, ‘Wild Danish’, ‘Trotro & Zaza’ and ‘BeddyByes’ led the pack, with all four titles playing in venues where buyers made up more than 55% of all attendees. Produced by Dutch studio Submarine, the 2D series ‘Max’ (pictured) attracted the best of both worlds, playing to a room full of buyers who would then talk about the project for the rest of the event.

Gender parity

According to attendance figures released by the organizers, Europe’s premier pitching event for TV animation is a 50-50 affair. Still, male directors far outnumbered their female colleagues, with only a quarter of the projects selected this year led by women and around 10% led by mixed teams. Parity between producers is a little more balanced, with 54% of projects carried out by men, 26% by women and 20% by mixed production teams. With the aim of increasing gender parity, Eurimages, the main European cultural support fund for the audiovisual sector, recently introduced new measures offering projects directed by women support of up to 25% of the total budget in all genres. .

Ecological themes

Series like “Aquaworld,” “Welcome to Permacity,” and “Keiko and the Floating World” built specific narrative worlds around themes of ecological transformation, but widespread environmental concerns could be felt across the board. On the contrary, it might be faster to list the locations that doesn’t mention the topic in some way. Pitch projects “The Last Whale Singer” and “The Tinies” both focused on using the Unreal real-time 3D engine as a way to dramatically reduce carbon footprint, while titles like “Gouti’s Great Journey”, “Feathered Vignettes”, and “Anuki” demonstrate a keen awareness of the fragility of the natural world. In animation – as in every other industry – these concerns are on everyone’s mind.

Adaptations and intellectual property

Adaptations of one genre or another accounted for just under 40% of all pitch projects this year, while, for the first time, a delegation of 25 publishers attended the event looking original titles that can function as children’s books. Annick Maes of the Cartoon Forum tells Variety that the bet of the edition has already paid off and that such delegations could very well become essentials of future Cartoon events. On the side note, although nearly every presentation promised lucrative licensing potential, two financiers cited “Star Stable: Mistfall” as a project that could leverage an existing (and well-oiled) IP engine without having to to build the marketing machine from scratching.

Inclusiveness

A number of projects this year focused on issues of diversity and social inclusion, casually representing often stigmatized identities. Among them, the Greek series “My Superhero Husband” and the Belgian project “Hamsters” highlighted queer protagonists whose sexual orientation was not central to the story. Championing the diversity of another genre, “Maddie + Triggs” followed the adventures of a 7-year-old girl whose visual impairment was less the center of the story than a consequence of it. In terms of visual design, the production team used bold colors with iconic character palettes, strong geometric shapes, and minimalist background styles to establish an aesthetic that was accessible to as wide a spectrum of viewing as possible. .