Apr 8, 2019

Selling Your First Animated Series: 'Wishfart' Co-Creator John Hazlett on How He Did It

One of the most intriguing nominations at the recent Canadian Screen Awards was for the up-and-coming series "Wishfart," which was nominated in five notable categories for a first-year series.

While it did not win any awards, the nominations were well deserved. [The nominations were for Best Director (Jason Grohl), Best Sound (Scott McCrory), and Best Screenplay (Emmer Connon, Stephanie Kaliner, and co-creators John Hayslett, Lienne Sawatzky, and Daniel Williams). Many animated TV series are flashy and wild, but "Wishfart" (like "Brainfart") is a wonderful exception. The series follows a teenage leprechaun (who often gets confused in his attempts to make wishes come true) and his friends (Puffin, aka Puffin, and Akiko, a ghost girl), and is beautifully conceived, designed, and scripted to convey diversity, adolescent confusion, materialism, identity, self-control / dependency, and subtly incorporates a positive message about the world.

What makes Wishfart even more unique is that it is completely creator-driven: the trio of John Hazlett, Lienne Sawatsky, and Daniel Williams have worked in Canada (Teletoon), France (Canal +), the UK (the show actually debuted on ITV), Norway, Africa, and Russia, and created, co-wrote, and produced the series.

Cartoon Brew spoke with co-creator John Hazlett for the backstory behind Wishfart's rather unique and encouraging genesis.

Cartoon Brew: First of all, you must be pleased to have received so many Canadian Film Award nominations in just one season.

John Hazlett: Three nominations in the screenplay category is definitely a fun nod for a show created and run by screenwriters.

Tell us a little about the genesis of the show

John Hazlett: Lienne, Dan, and I met in Montreal. They were already established writers and were working in animation. I was writing, directing, and producing a feature film. I saw them at one of the writers' parties and had heard they were in the "TV business," so I invited them to lunch. We came up with a live-action project and went around pitching it. It was a no-brainer, but we had a lot of fun doing it.

One day Dan came up with an idea for a live-action show about a guy in a green suit with unlimited funds who went around granting wishes to people. Lienne and I thought it was a ridiculous idea. I suggested that since Dan and Lienne had written cartoons before, why not make one for children? [Animation is a little different than live action.

John Hazlett: When I first came up with the idea, Lienne and Dan were both accomplished animators and had good relationships in the industry, so I wrote and sent a sales pitch to all the big names and production companies. We got a lot of positive feedback, but they all passed. It was disappointing at the time, but it meant that we still had control over the project.

Some said we should not sell directly to the network, others said we should not sell without artwork. So we sold directly to Teletoon without artwork. Around the same time, Tatiana Kober, an international distributor, came on board as a producing partner. So we looked like a real team. No one said, 'Where's the studio, where's the producer?'"

You secured a development deal from Teletoon and eventually greenlit John Hazlett: The learning curve was steep. I had experience producing feature films but no animation experience, and Lienne and Dan had plenty of experience with rooms and writing schedules, but everything else was new to me. I worked with a team of business people and accountants in development, so I relied on them as well.

When we finally got the go-ahead, we all looked at each other, took a deep breath, and said, 'We can do this, we can make it work.'

One of the most stressful moments was when we went into production and funding was not finalized. The first writers' room had started and the money had not yet flowed from the bank. We had run into funding problems before (did I mention we were screenwriters?), so we made a promise really early on that we would pay the screenwriters in a timely manner no matter what. So we all put our personal resources into paying the writers and getting the production off the ground. It was a pretty anxious time, but I think I felt like a real producer at the time.

And as we got better funding and the production went longer, we realized that we were actually producers. It takes hundreds of people to produce an animated series, and there are many talented people out there with great expertise. When you find the right people, they make the whole team look good. [John Hazlett: My producer partner, Tatiana, had a lot of connections on the production side, so we brought the project to several studios for character testing. Slap Happy really stood out, they perfected Akiko right away, and their work had a really contemporary feel to it. And we came up with all the other characters together. Some were simple, others, like Puffin, had dozens of versions reworked. If you review the development folder, there are a lot of really great characters that were never used. Just scraps of them could have been used to create another program.

Ultimately, choosing and refining the design was a process. We had an idea (sometimes three different ideas) of who the character should be. How it became a solid visual was our discovery, facilitated by the genius [work] of Slap Happy. We wanted to avoid a character that was generally thin-lined and boxy; we wanted to avoid a character that was too much like a box.

It must have taken some adjustment to have to collaborate or to have to compromise a little bit on your vision

John Hazlett: We had to learn how to collaborate and oversee the process. One thing we learned is that if the creators are allowed to oversee the show through all aspects of the process, you get a stronger vision and a stronger show. Whether it's voice recordings, boards, animation, design, music, sound mixes, or any other creative aspect, having someone who knows where the show is going will yield better results. There are so many places where a show can go off the beaten path that it really needs a navigator.

When it comes to compromises, it is dramatic to talk about conflicts with the networks, but Teletoon's Athena Georgaklis has been a supporter of the project from the beginning. Her notes always added to and improved the story. She was our guardian angel. Every project needs someone like that.

It's like an episode of Wishfart. We had to work our tails off to get [Teletoon] to grant our wishes and work hard to make them come true...

John Hazlett: It was a roller coaster ride, and as with any project, there were a lot of moments where everything could fall apart.