May 15, 2020

CASE STUDY: How "My Magic Pet Morphul" Became One of Youtube's Biggest Children's Shows

In 2011, when Youtube for children was not yet so crowded, a young Dutch animator decided to give the platform a try. Arthur van Melwijk felt uninspired and unfocused by Youtube's existing early childhood programming, so he launched his own series with a simple concept.

Ten years later, "My Magic Pet Morphle" has become a success that even van Melwijk could not have dreamed of. The channel has nearly 8 million subscribers and over 5 billion views. Since being acquired last year by Moonbug, a company that acquires and develops kids' content, Morphle has expanded to other platforms, including Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Van Merwijk has been working on the series for a long time. At first, he basically made the episodes alone. Now he is the creative director, working closely with the production team in Amsterdam. The acquisition by London- and L.A.-based Moonbug has not changed much in the way the show is produced. However, Moonbug is rapidly expanding its scope of operations and developing its IP.

Youtube is notoriously a fickle platform for creators, and as Van Merwijk told Cartoon Brew, it took a combination of luck, creative instinct, data analysis, and programming. First, we started in 2011 as a nursery rhyme channel. At the time, I was fresh out of animation school and wanted to make children's cartoons similar to the ones I loved. So I thought it would be a fun side project to start a Youtube channel for such an audience. At the time, most children's channels were somewhat random collections of cartoon songs and videos that had nothing in common.

That's why I came up with the idea of morphing into different forms for each video: in the video for "The Wheels on the Bus" I could be a bus, and in "Itsy Bitsy Spider" I could be a spider. I figured that way the kids would have a playmate to play with through all the songs. I was inspired by my childhood favorite Barber Papa and a Dutch comic book called Octoknopy.

It wasn't until 2015 that the "TV show format" of the show as we know it today became a reality. I had not paid much attention to the Nursery Rhyme Channel for a while because I wanted to produce shows through a more traditional platform. But one day it hit me that I already had an audience and could produce and distribute my own shows through a Youtube channel.

As far as I know, Morful was the first toddler channel on Youtube to tackle video like episodes of a traditional TV show. At the time, most other channels were about songs, educational videos, toy unveilings, or uploads of shows originally produced for television. From the moment I made changes to the channel, Morphul's popularity really skyrocketed.

Morphle started with absolutely no resources, except for those involved in video production. The original nursery rhymes were composed with music by my sister, a professional singer. The characters were drawn by me and the rig animation was done by a great friend of mine, Daan Versink (now showrunner of the CG toddler show "Dr. Panda"). None of us received any money up front. We just split the profits from the video.

Later, when I started doing episodes in TV show format, I actually did everything myself. The backgrounds, the characters, the animation, and the voices - with the important help of my girlfriend, who did the voices of the women and children. This was a lot of work, but a really fun time.

Even though I went to animation school, I am more of a producer and writer/director than an animator, character designer, or background artist. One of the biggest challenges was the mental barrier to getting content out into the world that I still felt lacked "quality." But I knew there was no other way to make the program work than to do it all myself and focus on the elements that mattered most to the kids. For them, quality is not about having every frame perfect, but about playfulness and imagination.

For about a year, I produced all the episodes myself, saved my money, invested all the money I earned from those videos (which was very scary), and set up a studio here in Amsterdam. I hired animators and artists, improved the quality of the episodes, and increased the number of episodes produced per month.

The key strategy in Youtube is that you need to find a way to produce a lot of content while keeping your audience engaged. Of course, this is a difficult task for animation, especially when starting with no resources.

In the case of Morphle, we had to develop our own workflow. We hired a programmer to program the software in-house so we could produce episodes faster. It worked. Our studio now has one person storyboarding and animating a four-minute episode a week.

This workflow does not apply to all animators. Historically, Dutch animation schools have been very focused on training generalized animators rather than specialists who concentrate on specific parts of the process. Also, Dutch culture is quite independent-oriented.

The combination of these two factors has been great for our workflow, although it has had its downsides in certain aspects of the industry. Our two primary writer/directors/animators, Mark Bastian and Danne Bakker, have been creating their own morphul episodes in a very independent way for a long time now. They were key to the development of the morphul world.

This surprises many, given some of the counter-intuitive children's channels that have become popular channels, but Youtube needs to focus primarily on the content of the episodes. There are many complex theories about algorithms, but if children and their parents continue to play your videos more than others, Youtube will promote them. The main strategy is to create fun and exciting episodes inspired by children's play and themes and emotions that resonate with children.

The main reason for the show's success is the idea that morphul is a plaything. When Morphul transforms into whatever Mira comes up with, that is child's play. She imagines herself as a giant robot, or she pretends to be an elephant on daddy's back.

I have always felt that a lot of narrative content for young children follows an overly rigid story structure modeled after works for adults and older children. Structured storytelling is very important for those audiences, but when young children play, things cascade intuitively. We've tried to draw inspiration from that, and I think that's one of the reasons why we've been able to outperform more traditionally structured shows.

It has historically been difficult for creators and buyers to connect with what young kids want to see, because what kids enjoy is not always what adults expect. it is very interesting to me that Youtube has democratized this process, because it has made it easier for us to connect with young kids, and it has made it easier to find the right audience. It has taken the guesswork out of what kids like. If they really like it, Youtube will show it to a wider audience.

Currently, Morphul is viewed on a variety of platforms, including Netflix and Amazon Prime. There is always feedback on which episodes are good and which are not. This is one of the great powers of Youtube, but it is important not to be fooled by numbers alone.

When we notice in our data that a subject is popular with our audience, we always try to understand what children enjoy about that subject by looking at the play of real children in their families and by going back to our own childhood memories.

After all, it is millions of real children who watch the videos we make, and that is the most important part. Some of the most rewarding moments in our morphul journey are seeing pictures of children around the world dressed in handmade morphul Halloween costumes or throwing morphul-themed birthday parties.

When we launched our channel in 2011, we were lucky that the competition on Youtube was fairly low. However, Youtube for kids was generally not as big as it is now, so it still took years for the channel to reach hundreds of thousands of subscribers; in 2016, the popularity of the channel exploded to millions of kids in a matter of months. The main change was that I started a storytelling format and set up a studio to produce more episodes per month.

Now, it would be much more difficult to start an animation channel from scratch. There are many competitors, some of which have very high production values. To compete now, I think you have to spend a lot of money quickly, with little time to test characters and concepts.