ANNECY: Following the company’s MIFA press conference this week, Julien Borde, president of Mediawan Kids & Family, offers his thoughts on how the animation industry needs to reinvent itself as it faces its ‘first big crisis.’
Julien Borde
What are your main objectives at Annecy this year?
We come to Annecy with great new shows and movies for our partners. On the movie front, the Annecy Festival official competition features A Magnificent Life, an animated biopic on Marcel Pagnol’s incredible life, directed and written by Sylvain Chomet. He’s one of the greatest animation movie directors, with credits including The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, and the film is produced by Mediawan, What The Prod, Picture Box and Bidibul Productions in coproduction with Walking The Dog.
For the first time in our annual press conference earlier this week, we welcomed two new companies: Miraculous Corp, for an update on the new projects coming from the creative minds behind the phenomenon Miraculous, and Toon2Tango, which is now part of Mediawan Kids & Family. We also announced a new range of content specifically developed for YouTube, in collaboration with partners who are already highly influential in the digital field.
What is the biggest issue facing the animation industry?
We are going through the first big crisis of the animation industry. It has multiple reasons, starting with the slowdown in streaming and kids’ animation content orders from pay TV [and including] a shift in consumption on YouTube and social networks. On top of that, AI is increasingly enabling more creators to produce and distribute their content.
I believe this crisis is really complex, but the animation industry has many resources to overcome this hardship and reinvent itself. People still consume but in different ways. Animation is serving other genres more and more, like documentary and drama in mixed-media forms. And guess which genre is dominating the box office? Our company is in the right place.
Somewhere Animation’s Artefacts – Thieves of Thieves is designed by Stéphane Berry
Where do you see the biggest opportunity in the animation sector at the moment?
Independent animated movies, originals for kids and adult animation. We like to work and produce a lot of evergreen IPs but we are also big believers in fresh and original ideas. Each great franchise started as an unknown original, so it’s important to be able to incubate new ideas and support new talent to bring premium-quality storytelling experiences to worldwide audiences. Innovations in digital and AI, when used wisely, offer great solutions to do things differently and implement new approaches and business models.
How can animation companies survive and thrive during a period of economic instability?
It’s critical to embrace change and try not to replicate old recipes. It’s not an easy task in animation because everything is very much elaborated from financing to production pipeline. But change is good and ‘copying and pasting’ is never the answer. We believe in the positive impact AI can have on the industry; if, and only if, AI is empowered by human creators, it will allow us to go faster and to better meet the audience’s needs.
Toon2Tango show Monster Loving Maniacs is being shopped at MIFA
What new shows are coming down the line that you’re particularly focused on?
Our prefinanced portfolio of new projects includes a wide and diversified range of content for all targets and created by the best talent around Europe. Banana Sioule is a 10-plus action-adventure series in development at Method Animation for a streaming platform. At Somewhere Animation, Artefacts – Thieves of Thieves is a new original universe designed by Stéphane Berry, one of the creators of staple series Totally Spies!, that is now in development. In preschool, Submarine is preparing a new series called Max in coproduction with Tchack. We are also focusing on internal coproduction with the first project between Method Animation and Toon2Tango, Littlest Robot.
Our distribution catalogue now offers more than 3,000 half-hours of content coming from our own studios and from third parties, such as Dogmatix and The Indomitables and the successful Barn Kidz. We are also thrilled to have two BBC shows delivered this year: Maddie & Triggs and Duck & Frog. This year, MIFA is also the first [event] where our distribution teams will offer Toon2Tango shows, among them the hit show Monster Loving Maniacs and two truly unique preschool shows, Hey Fuzzy Yellow and Thinker Ben. Last but not least, we will also present Mr Crocodile, produced by Magical Society and commissioned by France Télévisions and Nickelodeon.
BBC show Maddie & Triggs
What have been your most successful shows of the past six months and why?
Our studios are producing 10 TV series and three animated movies, which is a strong performance in a time of crisis. We are proud to bring fresh, original ideas to the market with the potential of becoming the next generation’s favourite IPs.
Comedies are working well and have more and more appeal in the market. We have several projects in the pipeline: Tuff Pom, coproduced by the BBC and France Télévisions; Ki&Hi for Canal+; and our action-adventure new universes Witch Detectives for TF1, Super RTL and Rai; and Karters for WarnerMedia. Our reboot of the Three Musketeers for France Télévisions, Rai and ZDF is already sold in more than 30 territories. Finally, Robin Hood: Mischief in Sherwood remains our second most successful brand after Miraculous’s skyrocketing ratings on KiKa, ZDF and TF1.
