Sep 23, 2019

Cartoon Forum 2019: How to Create a Children's Series in Times of Anxiety?

The Cartoon Forum, an important pitching platform for European animated television projects, took place last Thursday in Toulouse, France.

The event was established to facilitate networking in a region where co-productions are the norm. But centralizing the business of pitching has a beneficial side effect. With dozens of series being released one after another, and a thousand professionals gathering to discuss them, trends in the vast and scattered TV animation industry can emerge.

While there was talk about the disruptive power of streaming platforms and hype about trendy transmedia projects, what I was thinking and talking about in Toulouse was another, more fundamental theme. As politics polarizes, intolerance spreads, and the planet heats up, human society feels more endangered than ever. Adults need only talk to their own children to understand the horrors that are gripping their generation. The youngest artists who pitched at the forum grew up in these conditions themselves.

Many of the projects I saw foregrounded these issues.

Inspired by adult satire shows like “The Daily Show,” “Snake News” tackles the news head-on. The series is set in a newsroom where anthropomorphic snakes work, and in live-action segments, snake puppets visit schools and discuss current events with children.

Although the title alludes to fake news, the creators told us that their subject matter is not media literacy per se. They said, “We want to remove the cynicism of children about politics,” but how this ties in with the ironic tone remains to be seen.

While avoiding the news, other projects tackled current events and posed thorny questions about today's world with fantastical stories. Dounia (pictured above), the first animated film by Canadian game company Tobo, follows a Syrian refugee girl as she travels the world. Among Dounia's few possessions are a handful of nigella seeds from her homeland, and when she sows them, magical episodes occur. In one case, the strict border guards begin to dance with the refugees before allowing them to pass through.

“Subjects like war are difficult to tackle directly when dealing with a young public,” explains producer Judith Beauregard. Broadcasters tend to shy away from projects that deal with this subject because they don't want to traumatize children.” Because talking about migration means showing situations that can be unsettling. ...... The magic element was employed in the early stages of the project.

“Ishmael's Journey” takes a similar approach. A Muslim man and his 10-year-old daughter in Europe use giant pigeons to travel back in time and discover the societies in which the world's major religions were formed. This series of short films aims to promote interreligious (and nonreligious) understanding by explaining how these religions came to be believed in.

The series' playwright, Ismael Saidi, previously addressed this theme in his successful stage play Jihad. The specific themes addressed in Ishmael's Journey, such as the Koran's position on Judaism, were inspired by questions submitted by children after the performance. The purpose of this series is to re-contextualize the themes,” said Kurt Steinberg, Director of the Center for Children's Literature and Theatre. The aim of the series is to recontextualize the themes,” said the director, ”to create a world that doesn't exist anymore [in order to appeal to the children's imagination].

Animation's ability to recontextualize, to make us rethink an issue by presenting it from a surprising new angle, was also at the heart of another, more mature project: Some of Us, which gave voice to athletes facing some form of discrimination, be it racism, sexism, or homophobia. The film gives voice to athletes who have faced some form of discrimination, whether it be racism, sexism, or homophobia. Live-action interviews with the subjects alternate with hand-drawn animations that attempt to symbolically capture their emotional responses to abuse.

Director Jean-Charles Mboti Malolo sees animation as a universal language that can articulate the common experiences of disparate athletes. Now “feminism” has become a dirty word. It means “wanting women to dominate society. Many people think so. It is super important to recontextualize these words and define them in the same way. Animation lends itself to this because it allows for more expressive imagery immediately.”

Although “Sum of Us” targets teens and adults, Mboti Malolo warns against spoiling young viewers. We think we can show children more,” he said. We tend to categorize our programs as 'for kids' or 'for preschoolers,' when in fact we could show them something more adult oriented, with a political message, so to speak.”

Intolerance, discrimination, conflict: these themes run through many of the feature-length animated films that have been popular in recent years, both for children and adults. It helps that these themes are easy to embody with lively and interesting characters. Climate change is manifested not in the actions of people, but in the complex workings of the world's ecosystems.

Still, creators have found ways to allude to climate change. Searching Snowflake, a clay-animated TV special by veteran Estonian stop-motion studio Nukufilm, is about a snowman's search for more snow during an unseasonably warm winter.

One of two young brothers in “The Palimpsest Tree,” a gentle and humorous series set in sub-Saharan Africa, dreams of inventing a machine that will reverse global warming. In “Cloudy,” a Sponge Bob-esque comedy set in a community of cloud-like creatures, technology is placed in the hands of humans, who are the villains and are eager to control the weather through devious means.

Since Crowdy's presentation focused on the characters' mischievous adventures, I asked producer Emmanuel-Alain Reynal to what extent the series would be about environmental issues. 'Of course it will,' he replied, but added that this theme will not be central to every episode. For our generation, climate change was a science fiction fantasy. For [the younger generation], the end of the world is real.” Reynal said the topic often comes up in discussions with students and recent graduates.

Reynal, like many others who attended the event, pondered the balance between addressing current issues with integrity and presenting them in a way that is acceptable to children. This conundrum, one that producers of children's programming have always faced, took on new meaning given the urgency of today's issues.

As I was thinking about this, I met Delphine Morley, an experienced producer of children's programming. She was frustrated with the projects she had seen: “How can we [the industry] get together and confront the big existential questions? I don't know how to speak to children who are in the abyss.”

One thing is clear to her. Desperate times call for a different approach. Her words came back to her when she left Toulouse on Friday and saw a world shaken by climate change protests led by children (some of them not even teenagers).

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