Author: Ryan Ball

Having created the successful Nickelodeon series The Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom, Butch Hartman has proven himself a valuable asset for the kid cabler. It was announced today that Nickelodeon Networks has signed him a new, multi-year agreement to create original animated and live-action programming for Nickelodeon and Noggin.

"This deal gives me the opportunity to bring to life, via animation and live-action, some of the ideas and characters that have been screaming inside my head," Hartman comments. "Working with everyone at Nickelodeon over the past several years has been hugely satisfying and I look forward to forging the same kind of terrific creative alliances with the folks at Noggin."

Having worked as an artist for Don Bluth, Marvel Prods. and Hanna-Barbera, Hartman first teamed up with Nickelodeon in 1997 to create an 11-minute animated short titled Fairy Godparents for the series, Oh Yeah! Cartoons. The short was then picked up as the pilot for The Fairly OddParents, which debuted in early 2001. The series has gone on to ratings success, coming second only to SpongeBob SquarePants among kids 2-11.

Based on the success of OddParents, Nickelodeon gave Hartman the green light for Danny Phantom, a show about a teenager who becomes part-ghost and uses his strange powers to fight evil phantoms. The show debuted in 2003 and has also been a solid ratings grabber for the broadcaster.

The new deal was negotiated by Ellen Goldsmth-Vein of The Gotham Group, Aaron Kaplan of the William Morris Agency, and attorney Bill Sobel of Edelstein, Laird and Sobel.

Barcelona-based 3D animation house Lion Toons has created a commercial department to handle the company’s first two original series, which it plans to launch at this year’s MIP TV, taking place April 11-15 in Cannes, France. The new arm will be headed by journalist Jorge Pati’o, who will initially focus on closing pre-sales and researching co-production opportunities.

Cosme the Astronuat is a 52 x 3:30 series Lion Toons is developing for kids 4-8. The show follows the adventures of Cosme, a celestial explorer who will visit a different planet in each episode.

The company is also working on Ted Vision, a 104 x 3:30 series aimed kids 6-10. The comedy centers on a TV reporter who always runs into trouble as he’s trying to conduct interviews.

Both 3D-animated series will be presented at the TV market with a pilot program and a complete first episode, as well as conceptual and graphic materials and a financial plan focused on European Broadcasters.

The addition of the commercial arm will allow Lion Toons to nurture its own productions while still providing service work for clients, which has been the company’s focus since it was founded four years ago.

Nonprofit educational organization Sesame Workshop has commissioned Brooklyn, New York-based Dancing Diablo Studio (DDS) to design and produce 11 short animated short films for use in both international and domestic TV productions.

The shorts Get Up and Grow, Snake in Snow, Home Sweet Home, Cat and Mouse, Counting Snake, Shaping Rivalry, Monkey Mosaic, Fish Mosaic, Owl Mosaic and Frog Mosaic will be inserted into half-hour international programming, while La Abuela will be incorporated into a one-hour domestic Sesame Street show sometime in April.

"Sesame Workshop came to us looking for innovative and engaging educational content to be inserted into their programming," explains Dancing Diablo chairman/creative director Beatriz Helena Ramos. "This was our first collaboration with Sesame Workshop and it was a wonderful experience. They encouraged us and gave us the freedom to experiment."

Lisa Annunziata, Sesame Workshop’s assistant VP of international production, comments, "Dancing Diablo got us. They were sensitive to our needs and the needs of our audience. They have a strong background in the Latin community and it brings an added dimension to this international work."

In creating the animation, Dancing Diablo employed Adobe After Effects, Adobe PhotoShop, Final Cut Pro and, for the stop-motion work, a high-resolution digital still camera. The shorts vary in length from two t0 four minutes, and exhibit a variety of different styles ranging from the moving painting feel of Get Up and Grow to the 2D Flash look of Cat and Mouse and the clay-animated Snake in Snow and Home Sweet Home.

Get Up and Grow has been selected for screening in the New York Int’l Children’s Film Festival 2005, and all of the shorts will be making the festival rounds in the U.S. and abroad.

Founded in 2002, Dancing Diablo provides traditional animation, stop-motion, CG and Flash work for clients including 4Kids Prods. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV/Paramount Pictures and Noggin, as well as a number of advertising entities. For more information, go to

http://dancingdiable.com.

Fox’s long-running, animated primetime hit, The Simpsons, was among the winners as The Writers Guild of America, west and East held its 57th annual awards ceremony over the weekend. Recognizing outstanding achievement in writing for the screen, television and radio, the gala event was held Saturday at The Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles and the Pierre Hotel in New York.

In the Animation category, scribe Ian Maxtone-Graham won for the Simpsons episode Catch ‘Em If You Can. The installment spoofs the Steven Spielberg feature, Catch Me If You Can, as Homer and Marge try to take a vacation away from the kids and find themselves on the run from their jealous offspring.

The Simpsons dominated the animation category, garnering four out of the five nominations. Other episodes of the show up for the award were “Today I Am A Clown,” written by Joel H. Cohen; “Fraudcast News,” written by Don Payne; and “Milhouse Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” written by Julie Chambers and David Chambers. The only other toon to get a nod in the category was Cartoon Network’s Justice League, nominated for the episode “Starcrossed,” written by Rich Fogel, John Ridley and Dwayne Mcduffie from a story by Fogel.

In the category News–TV Graphic Animation, the winner was CBS 2 Celebrates Subway Centennial/Sports Block, written by Christopher T. Ingram.

Seinfeld‘s John O’Hurley hosted the West Coast event, where presenters included Alan Alda (The Aviator), Rachel Bilson (The O.C.), Zach Braff (Scrubs), Julie Delpy (Before Sunset), David Duchovny (The X-Files), Craig Ferguson (The Late, Late Show), Dennis Haysbert (24), Anne Heche (Deep Impact), George Lopez (The George Lopez Show), William H. Macy (The Cooler) and Meg Ryan (Anastasia).

The New York event was hosted by actor Charles Grodin. Presenters included directors Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), author Art Buchwald and actors Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager) and Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City).

Honorary awards were previously announced and presented to the recipients at the Los Angeles ceremony. David Mamet received Screen Laurel Award; Susan Harris was honored with the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television and Don Payne was given the Paul Selvin Award.

The Writers Guild of America, East Special Awards were presented to John Sayles (Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement), John Auerbach (Richard B. Jablow Award for Distinguished Service to the WGAE), and Claire Labine (Evelyn F. Burkey Award for “bringing honor and dignity to writers everywhere”).

For a full list of winners, go to www.wga.org.

Beginning April 1, Cartoon Network will broadcast completely in Russian for local markets. The animation cable network’s Russian service will join its other 11 language feeds airing throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

"Russia is a key business market for Turner Broadcasting and one that has huge potential in terms of cable and satellite possibilities," says Gordana Duspara-Moriaty, Cartoon Network’s commercial director for Northern/Eastern Europe."

To ensure accurate and authentic dubbing, Cartoon Network worked closely with several dubbing studios in Moscow and St Petersburg, incorporating a mix of local dialects.

The new service arrives just as Cartoon Network is set to debut its new lineup, which includes the new shows Krypto the Superdog (April 4), The Life and Times of Juniper Lee (June 5), Camp Lazlo (July) and IGPX (The Immortal Grand Prix), coming in November. The broadcaster will also air new episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door, The Cramp Twins, Billy and Mandy, Ed, Edd n Eddy in 2005.

The anime-inspired, Nickelodeon-produced series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, debuts Monday, Feb. 21 on the kid cabler. Animation Magazine Online spoke with the show’s co-creators and exec. producers, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko about this new mythical adventure which craftily blends Japanese-style animation and Easten philosophy with western sensibilities.

Avatar: The Last Airbender centers on Aang, a fun-loving 12-year-old who must forego a normal life in order to master his latent powers over the four elements. In the debut episode, Aang the Avatar is discovered in a cavernous iceberg, where he had been trapped for 100 years. Once freed, he befriends his emancipators, Katara and Sokka, and struggles to evade the capture of Prince Zuko, a teenage Firebender who has attacked the Water Tribe in search of him.

Konietzko and DiMartino met several years ago at Rhode Island school of Design. DiMartino, who was a couple years ahead in school, landed a directing job at Film Roman and later got Konietzko hired as a character designer on Family Guy. The duo also worked together on the Fox primetime series Mission Hill and King of the Hill.

During their free time, DiMartino and Konietzko worked on ideas for their own animated projects and had the opportunity to pitch Avatar to Eric Coleman, head of development at Nickelodeon, while Konietzko was working on the network’s Invader Zim.

"Part of the impetus for the idea was that Nickelodeon was specifically looking for a legends-and-lore mythology show and we’re really interested in those kinds of shows," notes DiMartino. "Then, just out of our interest in anime, martial arts films, Eastern philosophies, the Showgun and things like that, we developed the idea of the Avatar world and the bending and everything else."

Konietzko says that gong from working on hit shows to creating their own contender was a natural progression for the multi-talented artists. "We took the tools we developed from various positions. We had storyboarded, directed, designed, did timing and Mike had written for his own projects." says Konietzko. "So we just honed the skills we had and found good people to fill in everywhere else. That’s how we’re here now."

While DiMartino and Konietzko think Avatar’s anime style is simply appropriate for an Asian-inspired story, they say there were other considerations in adopting the Eastern aesthetic. Konietzko comments, "We’d been working on a lot of different shows. Invader Zim in particular had such a distinct style that was really only Jhonen Vasquez’s look and no one else really knew how to draw it. At one point the production sent me over to Korea to train the overseas staff on how to draw [his] style because it was so idiosyncratic. I just realized that a lot of effort on every single American show was spent trying to teach everyone, stateside and overseas, a brand-new style. That’s cool and all, but Mike and I really wanted good animation, so we talked about using a style the overseas studios are more familiar with and comfortable with, and ideally, a style that they are better at."

Though he gives props to Asian artists for being the best creating anime, Konietzko thinks it’s ridiculous to claim that they have a monopoly on the style. "Everyone talks about anime being Japanese, and it certainly is, but we all grew up with it here, too," he says. "So It’s hard for someone to say, ‘hey, you can’t draw that style,’ because I had Robotech toys when I was a kid."

Avatar is animated in Korea at JM Animation and DR Movie. "We really wanted the overseas studios to be more involved creatively," Konietzko comments. "The animation process is really important, obviously, but in most TV production structures, it’s sort of an afterthought and used as a factory situation." He and DiMartino spent about four months in Korea working on the show’s hour-long pilot and say they got to know the animation crews personally. "We tried to set up a production that respected them as artists and gave them a chance to augment the show."

In citing influences for the look of the series, DiMatino runs off a list that includes the works of director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), Japanese toon house Studio Gainex (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and animation director Kôji Morimoto (Akira), who directed the Beyond segment of The Animatrix. As far as things they wanted to avoid in the show, he says, "Style-wise, we wanted to steer away from the flatness a lot of the shows have going now–the really graphic style. We wanted a more atmospheric, cinematic feel to the show."

Konietzko adds, "We also wanted to stay away from a really cartoony sense of good and evil–mustache-twisting villains and stuff like that. We tried to really get into the complex conflicts that can go on in the real world and bring that into our fanciful world and look deeper into our characters and give them a little more respect."

According to DiMartino, another thing that makes Avatar different from other action cartoon shows is the fact that its has a continuous storyline with each installment building on the previous one. "While the episodes aren’t all cliffhangers, if a character gets hurt or learns something in one show, it gets carried on to the next one. If you stick around and watch, you’ll see the characters grow and things develop."

Be sure and see how it all begins as Avatar: The Last Airbender kicks off with a one-hour special this Monday at 7 p.m. ET/PT before settling into its regular time slot on Fridays at 8 p.m.

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim runs a-fowl this weekend with Sunday night’s premiere of Robot Chicken, a new stop-motion animated comedy series created by actor/producer Seth Green and Mathew Senreich. The show uses action figures and other toys to take hilarious pop shots at pop culture staples such as Star Trek, MTV’s The Real World, and Fox’s American Idol.

Debuting Feb. 20 at 11:30, the 15-minute show is written largely by Green and Senreich, and features the voices of Scarlett Johansson, Burt Reynolds, Ryan Seacrest Mark Hamill, Seth McFarlane and Macauley Culkin, to name a few. Green, who provides the voice of Chris Griffin on Fox’s Family Guy, also voices characters in this irreverent program consisting of a series of short vignettes.

Green and Senreich struck up a friendship over their shared love of action figures and created a series of six animated shorts for Sony’s Screenblast website (www.screenblast.com). They then created a pilot which Cartoon network Snatched up. Robot Chicken’s stop-motion animation is directed by Seamus Walsh and Chris Finnegan of Screen Novelties in Los Angeles.

Robot Chicken will air regularly at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT on Cartoon Network.

Vanessa Chapman, former controller of CiTV, has purchased Create TV & Film from Danish investment firm Kirkbi. Chapman will serve as managing director for the U.K. company, which produces the stop-motion preschool series, Little Robots, which airs on BBC worldwide.

Create TV & Film was founded in 2003 as the production arm of toy maker LEGO. The Miramax-distributed, direct-to-video Bionicle film series, the company’s flagship franchise, is not included in the buyout.

Under Chapman Create TV & Film will be transformed into an all-new entity with plans to build on the success of Little Robots with new properties.

Cable network G4 (formerly G4TechTV) will be beefing up its Anime Unleashed block with new programming over the next few months. Fans of Japanese-style animation will be able to tune in for all-new episodes of

Magical Shopping Arcade Abenoshi, Gad Guard, R.O.D. the TV and Gungrave.

The new Anime Unleashed lineup kicked off earlier this month with the Feb. 7 premiere of ADV’s Magical Shopping Arcade Abenoshi, a show about geeky friends thrust into a parallel world full of killer kung-fu fighters, menacing mushrooms and a cast of madcap characters.

March offers new episodes of Gad Guard from Gonzo, the studio behind the popular anime series Last Exile and Hellsing. The show has Hajiki Sananda get into adventures with his Techode robot as he struggles to support his family. Fans can brush up on the last season when G4 repeats episodes 1-12 the week of Feb. 28 at 1 a.m. ET/10 p.m. PT Monday Through Friday. The new installments will then begin running March 7 at the same time.

In April, Anime Unleashed will debut never-before-seen episodes of R.O.D the TV, which follows the adventures of three young paper masters’Anita, Maggie and Michelle’who use their abilities to manipulate paper into wild weapons and magical objects to protect author Nenene the from a mad bomber. The fresh installments will premiere the week of April 4 at 1 a.m. ET/10 p.m. PT., with episodes 1-12 airing the week of April 25.

Finally, G4 brings Geneon’s Gungrave to fans in May. The highly popular series has Brandon Heat return from beyond the grave to bring down Millenion, the mafia organization that led to his demise. The outlet will air episodes 1-12 the week of April 25 at 1 a.m. ET/11 p.m. PT., with the all-new episodes starting Monday, May 2 at 1 a.m. ET/10 p.m. PT.

For more information of G4 and its programs, go to www.g4tv.com.

DRi Licensing and Yoram Gross-Em TV are getting into the zebra business. The two companies announced that they are developing an animated preschool series based on Zigby and Friends, Brian Paterson’s colorful books about a dynamic zebra and his friends. Harper Collins Children’s division first published the book in 2002, and since then, Paterson has delivered five pictures books and four board books and sold over 350,000 copies in 15 countries. A Christmas-themed Zigby book will hit stores later this year.

"Our plan is to produce a 26 x 10 minute series that will expand beyond the boundaries of the existing books to give Zigby an exciting new 2/3D world," says Geoff Watson, general manager of Yoram Gross-EM TV. "We are already in development with an animation team led by Guy Gross. A treatment will be available for presentation at MIP-TV in April. We are very pleased to have secured these rights and to be working with such a talented illustrator as Brian Paterson."

Zigby will join Aussie house Yoram Gross-EM.TV’s family of animated hits, including Blinky Bill, Dot and the Kangaroo and Flipper & Lopaka. Dri Licensing’s brands include Miffy, the World of Roald Dahl and Paterson’s Foxwood Tales.