Cartoon Network Studios’ global shorts programme is providing fertile ground for new series and uncovering artistic talent from around the world. Nico Franks reports.

Take a look at Cartoon Network (CN)’s schedule in the US and you’ll find a host of series that began as shorts, from Regular Show, Steven Universe, Clarence and Uncle Grandpa to the recent miniseries Over the Garden Wall.

For Rob Sorcher, chief content officer at CN, among the reasons the channel is the number-one US television network in primetime among boys aged 6-11 and 9-14 is that it’s dedicated to unearthing original artists via its global shorts programme.

“We’re the only studio to approach all of the work with the artist at the forefront of the development, versus a writer or a script, so everything is visually driven,” he says.

CN is by no means alone in having a global shorts programme, with rival kids’ channel Nickelodeon launching a similar initiative in 2013. However, since long before that, Sorcher has been an advocate for using shorts as the basis for new series, without the immediate interference of network executives or focus-group testing.

“The shorts programme is about the talent, not the concept. An artist may be unable to tell you in words what they’re going to make, because they work visually. So when we approach the shorts programme, we very purposefully try not to put a lot of judgement on what the series will be,” Sorcher says.

He compares it to watching a piece of work at the annual International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France, where cinemas across the picturesque lakeside town screen experimental and ingenious animations from around the world.

“It’s somebody’s personal expression. We’re not asking what episode five would look like. We’re actively removing that conversation entirely and tracking forward on the side of creativity and celebrating an artist’s point of view,” Sorcher adds.

CN is looking to work with around 10 creators per year on seven-minute shorts and was at Mifa, the professional part of the animation festival in Annecy, to promote the work it is doing on the international side of the programme.

It is moving forward with Apple & Onion, the first series in development with CN in the US that is based on a short from outside the country. The UK show’s creator, George Gendi, was also at Annecy, where avid CN fans were shown the pilot episode.

We Bare Bears, another CN series that started life as a short and began airing in the US last week, was also screened in Annecy as part of a panel session featuring its creator Daniel Chong alongside Gendi, Sorcher and Adventure Time storyboard artist and director Elizabeth Ito.

Last year, the network extended its global animation talent search further into Asia Pacific by bringing the shorts programme to the Philippines, while it is also open in Latin America and EMEA.

This is linked to the efforts of CN’s parent company, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), to strengthen ties between its various international arms and create original shows outside the US that can air on its feeds around the world.

Primarily, Sorcher says he is looking for a “diversity” of ideas on the network, with “talent that has a completely different point of view on the world and on their art because of where they come from.”

He adds: “I don’t want there ever to be a single look for a Cartoon Network show. One of the main reasons for saying yes to something should be that we have nothing else like it.”

Sorcher was at the Rio Content Market in Brazil last year and was impressed by the work of local producers, describing the region as a “hotbed of talent,” while he’s also an admirer of some of the new projects coming out of Australia, India and South Korea.

“Because the work starts visually and is about art rather than a concept that requires explaining, it really is an international language,” says Sorcher of animation.

However, it would be naive to think that any project destined to air on a channel operated by such a huge media organisation as TBS wouldn’t require a certain amount of input from those on the top floor.

“It’s only after the short is done that we then regroup and look at this thing we did. Can we do it as a television series, and what would have to change about it? Sometimes the look of the series is quite a big leap from what the short was and sometimes it’s pretty similar,” says Sorcher.

“Once you have to make 50 or 100 episodes of these things, that’s a machine that can’t stop and it can’t just be one person’s point of view. But our job is to protect the original core of what makes the show wonderful – the alchemy and the magic inside of it – when we take it to series.”

The studio, meanwhile, is reacting to the changing ways viewers are now watching content by turning the development process “inside out,” as Sorcher describes it, by creating properties that are designed to be “shareable and collectable” and distributing them across different platforms from the get-go.

Mighty Magiswords is the network’s first digital-first series and the property will debut on the Cartoon Network Anything mobile app later this year with a selection of interactive shorts and five mini-games.

Created by Kyle Carrozza (The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water), it’s a comedy adventure series centred on a brother-and-sister pair of warriors who use unique and silly swords with magical properties.

More shorts will then begin appearing on the Watch Cartoon Network video app and website, with larger-scale games and other “digital experiences” currently in production – all, presumably, leading up to an fully fledged TV series on the linear channel.

Each piece of content has been specially designed for the environment where it will be watched, says Sorcher. It’s a strategy that extends to the videos on YouTube, which will see characters in their bedrooms talking to the camera, like the countless vloggers that populate the video-sharing platform.

As for the kinds of ideas Sorcher is hoping to come across via the various shorts strands around the world, the three CN staples of comedy, action and fantasy are likely to be high on the agenda.

“We are obviously very rich in animated comedy right now. It is important that, as we go forward into the world of multiplatform, we retain the flavour of those comedies that have worked so well,” he says.

The exec, who prior to rejoining CN in 2007 helped bring hit dramas such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad to life at US cablenet AMC, isn’t planning on making anything with too much of a “hard edge,” and “pure action” is not on the cards at CN.

That said, Sorcher won’t rule anything out. “I prefer not to put too many limits on what we’re looking for or what we will do, because I want to be able to zag and go the way people never would have thought we would go.”

Given the network’s aforementioned popularity with boys, Sorcher is happy to point out that it is adding more girls to its demographic profile, while more of the showrunners on its series are women. Meanwhile, female animators lead eight of the 11 shorts currently in production at CN Studios.

“It’s not so much that we go after a gender. We don’t do that at all. It’s not a conscious thing to have so many female creators. But we are going after a diversity of viewpoints and that’s happened to be what’s in this year’s programme,” says Sorcher.

The exec believes this is mirroring what’s happening in the classes of universities around the States, such as the California Institute of Arts, where the gender balance is shifting.

Sorcher adds that today’s generation of boys are much more accepting of female protagonists on-screen, which has helped the network grow its audience share.

“Those old lines are not quite as hard. There’s a greater acceptance of various types of characters in our TV series. Cartoon Network has historically been known as a place for all the boys. That remains true. However, we have now added all the girls. So we are now a much larger and more successful network than ever.”