Hanna Mouchez

Hanna Mouchez
Founder and CEO
Miam! Animation
France
Pitching: The Tinies

What is the biggest issue facing the animation industry right now?
The animation industry is facing the same great challenges as all other industries: how to keep on producing while we have a war in Europe, while basic resources are scarce (electricity and computers mainly) and while all financing fees have tripled.

The volume of productions has never been so high but the amount of qualified talent has not increased the same amount. And most of all, worldwide global biodiversity is at risk, challenging the possibility [we can] keep on living on this planet.

The animation industry, just like any other, is greenhouse gas (GHG)-productive. We can have a positive impact on such GHG by adapting our production pipeline. We need to train ourselves, as managers and decision makers, to understand where the priorities of action are. We also need to train our teams.

What is your company doing in response to this?
At Miam!, ecology and sustainability are key values. All our activities have one common goal: to bring meaningful content to the market while being more sustainable on screen and behind the screen.

Edmond & Lucy (52×12′), our first preschool show, produced with France Televisions and HR/KiKia, has been made with Unity, a real-time rendering tool. It’s actually the first show to be mainly produced with Unity for a linear channel.

The show aims to reconnect kids and families to forests and to nature. Our choice of technology to produce it corresponds to the series’ concept of sustainability. Our episodes are rendered on a single machine, in just a few hours, instead of being calculated using several computers over a period of weeks, as is the case for pre-calculated CGI.

Our sustainability expert, Workflowers, calculated that the rendering of an episode of 12 minutes in real-time CGI generates about 0.15kg of CO2, which is quite promising, compared with the 336kg of CO2 generated by the rendering of a 12-minute episode in pre-calculated 3D. These figures are currently being integrated into the calculation of the carbon footprint for the production as a whole.

How do you see the rise of the metaverse impacting animation?
The metaverse seems like an incredible opportunity for the CGI animation industry, as well as for gaming. We are used to building full worlds with props and backgrounds that can be reused. If the idea is to build a new experience complementary to our shows, to let our audience play and interact with their favourite heroes, then why not? But I believe it will concern pre-teens and teens shows only, since preschoolers and kids are too young.

How do you work with YouTube Kids and is it a platform that supports high-quality animation producers?
We haven’t worked with YouTube Kids on a pre-financing deal, therefore we have only been able to consider them as a second window partner. Our line-up is made of new and exclusive content, which makes it quite hard for us to choose YouTube Kids as a broadcasting partner, in spite of their best efforts to build a safe and quality space for preschoolers and kids around the world.

We acknowledge their audience reach which is one of the biggest, and yet, with the increasing number of players including new SVoD platforms now made available in several regions, exclusivity has become a key differentiating element for our clients. In such context, it has become quite challenging to negotiate second windows for our shows, so when we succeed, we tend to value them to the maximum, which means to avoid revenue share and to prefer license fees.

Tell us about the project you are pitching at Cartoon Forum.
The Tinies (52×11′) is an adventure-comedy series, accompanied by 52×3′ DIY tutorials, for young kids commissioned by Canal+, with delivery due in Q4 2024. The project is based on a DIY book by Martine Camillieri called The Big Book of Little Crafts Projects.

The Tinies are ace tinkerers. With them, a milk cap, an egg box or an empty shampoo bottle will soon be crafted into a cool helmet, a skate park or a high-speed pickup truck. With Ollie and Titus, our two heroes, toys make up their own games and adventures.

It concretely shows kids how to play with the empty packages we usually throw in the recycling bin, so as to craft cool toy accessories – the art of upcycling.