Oct 20, 2023

The relocation of animation's most famous cat-and-mouse duo to Asia: How did Tom and Jerry end up in Singapore?

Animation's most famous cat-and-mouse rivalry resumes this weekend in Southeast Asia. It retains the spirited vigor of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's work, but adds a new element (who knew Tom liked durian?). [Available on Cartoon Network in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, and on HBO Go in Southeast Asia. Globally, the three-minute cartoon is available on Cartoon Network Asia's Youtube channel.

In the updated series, Tom and Jerry's traditional back-and-forth antics take place, this time in front of Singapore's most well-known landmarks. Last year, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) released a series of T&J shorts in Japan, but despite the kawaii-style design, the adventures were set in fantasy. As such, the Singapore airing will be the first localized version of the iconic duo.

The pilot version was released in August and can be seen below. [The short was produced in Singapore (Chips and Toon, Robot Playground Media) and India (Aum Animation Studios). Vivek Boller was the lead director of the short.

We recently interviewed the series' producer, Carlene Tan, about the show and how her team localized “Tom and Jerry,” who is also WBD's Director of Original Production and Development for Children in Asia Pacific. Tan is responsible for planning and overseeing the production of children's content for the WBD portfolio in the APAC region. [Are physical slapstick comedies and broad humor like “Tom & Jerry” popular in Singapore, or is it considered an American style of comedy? Tom and Jerry” makes our parents and even our grandparents laugh. It's truly a multi-generational experience.

When I lived in Singapore, when I was waiting at the dentist, waiting to pick up my passport, waiting at the hairdresser's, it was on the screen. Everyone was watching and everyone was enjoying it. With such a simple premise, how could you not like it?"

This is definitely not just American humor. Physical comedy works in all cultures. Whether the audience is Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Indian, slapstick makes everyone laugh. It is universal. [Although these cartoons are set in Singapore, they also have entertainment value for those who are not in Singapore. What specific elements did you try to localize to Singapore and what was intended to be universal for the South and Southeast Asian market -

At Cartoon Network, we often ask ourselves how we can make our shows and IP more relevant to our region We often ask ourselves how we can make our shows and IPs more relevant to our region. Tom & Jerry is obviously a franchise that is already resonating everywhere, but we began to wonder what it would look like with Asian influences (destination, locally perceived background, environment, etc.).

We are all familiar with Tom and Jerry living in spacious houses in suburban America, but how would they look and behave in a city like Singapore, where most of the population does not live in such housing -

and the props There were. As you can see from the pilot episode, Tom has a cricket bat, not a baseball bat. We hope these little touches will be appreciated by fans in South and Southeast Asia.

Of course, we had to think carefully about the characters themselves. How would Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse from Asia look? In this region, our favorite characters often have a “cuter” appearance. So we made them a little rounder and cuter, and their eyes a little bigger.

While any storytelling project has its challenges, for this project we were constantly thinking about what to use, what environment to use, and what gags would work. We constantly asked these questions at every stage of production, from storytelling to design. Even something as simple as what Tom would drink in a certain situation. The gags are funny, the poses are solid, and the timing is right every time. What was your process for staying true to the spirit of the original? All of us on the creative team really loved the Tom and Jerry episodes from the 1950s and early 1960s. That particular style of physical humor was what we were going for with this series.

Its success is undoubtedly due to the animation team. Parrot Animation in Mangalore, India, ensured that the timing was right. We went back and forth and made sure we got the timing just right. We all watched a lot of old “Tom and Jerry” to understand how the best gags work, but also to make sure we weren't rehashing old jokes and situations.

Conversely, how did you update the look and feel of the show? I think the pacing was the most obvious. Our Tom and Jerry moves much faster than the original.

Another thing we really loved about the original was the music. The jazzy sound of the big band that graces every sequence. We wanted to incorporate that, but also add an Asian flavor. So we hired a team from India called Tuning Fork, who had previously worked on the Cartoon Network original “Lamput.”

It wasn't easy to pull off, and there were some sleepless nights, but their compositions are a fusion of Asian with Western jazz feeling and melody, using local instruments. For strings and percussion, they used sitar, tabla, gamelan, and koto.

How was the production set up - did you have a traditional TV pipeline for this series or was there a special pipeline that was custom built for this production -

The whole project was a very collaborative It was a journey. In my career, the best shows are the ones where everyone is empowered and able to share ideas, from pre-production to production to post-production.

Since the series is set in Singapore, the story, design, and art direction came from both Chips and Toons and Robot Playground. The Singaporean artists provided the production team with many ideas, not only for Tom's drink, for example, but also for the types of plants and the background.

We set up a story room, where the whole team would meet and bounce ideas around until we had the seeds of a story we could bring to the animation team. Then we would thumbnail the gags and bring them together.

A fair amount of experimentation went into creating the pipeline. With each episode, we learned how we could streamline the process and what we wanted to do better in the next episode. It was all a collaborative effort.