Sonar tracks Bear & Salmon from Australia

Bear & Salmon centres on the unlikely friendship between the two creatures

Sonar Entertainment in the US is developing a preschool mixed-media series alongside the property’s Australian creators.

Sonar is working with Brisbane-based Like a Photon Creative on Bear & Salmon (104×3′), which was created by Nadine Bates and Kristen Souvlis.

The series revolves around the unlikely friendship between a bear and a fish as they travel upstream, pondering and discussing life’s mysteries from humorous opposing perspectives.

Andrea Gorfolova, president of Kids, Family & Factual at Sonar Entertainment, described the series as “groundbreaking, both conceptually and technologically.”

The show’s content is entirely created by two children who are telling their own stories through a series of question and answer discussion sessions. The animation is then designed to fit that material and form the structure of each episode.

The series also includes a versioning kit with technology that allows the content to be adapted in different languages and customised for any region.

“Not only have Nadine and Kristen allowed the content to be ingeniously and entirely created by children, capturing authentic answers to life’s biggest questions, the versioning system they’ve created for the series can track any story in any language and automatically animate it in real time,” said Gorfolova.

“This allows us at Sonar to provide distributors with a truly universal series, one that can feel completely authentic to any territory in the world.”