Last year, storied French animation outfit TeamTO was on the brink of folding. Today at Annecy, its new owners unveiled reinvention and expansion.
The PJ Masks outfit ran into financial problems after 20 years in operation and was bought in late 2024 by Italy’s Riva Studios for €2.6M ($3M) after a “highly competitive auction.”
Six months on, new CEO Marco Balsamo unveiled a sextet of shows, a push into 2D and adult animation, and new technology.
During an Annecy Studio in Focus event that has just finished, Balsmo showed audiences SKWAD!, TeamTO’s first adult animated 2D comedy, which is set in the world of MMA, along with Infinity, a cinematic adult action-drama from acclaimed director Jay Oliva.
Tapping into Balsamo’s love for soccer – his family owns a soccer team in New York – TeamTO is also making Shadow Soccer, an anime-inspired sports drama with supernatural elements. Completing the sextet are What’s Up, Eesha?, a whimsical preschool series co-produced with Maga Animation (Italy) and UMedia (Belgium), Greek mythology show Next Level: Odyssey and H.O.M.E., a sci-fi family comedy about a blended household living inside a retired intergalactic battle robot.
Speaking to Deadline before the Studio in Focus, Balsamo said CGI will “remain our bread and butter” but “we’ve always wanted to branch out and show a variety of what Team TO can accomplish, and that is in the 2D and adult animation space.” For the foreseeable future. the indie will take a roughly 50/50 split approach to its original IP work and production services, he added.
Balsamo and his team became interested in acquiring troubled studio TeamTO initially to rescue some IP the pair were working on titled Junichiro Jackson – “In our head it wasn’t buying the studio but getting back our IP,” he said – but he quickly realized TeamTO was a “turnkey” company.
“When we opened up the Pandora’s Box there’s this incredible team of people,” he added. “It’s a lot more than just CGI. And our job now is to optimize that and do the best we can to instil confidence within our team and our partners that we can re-establish ourselves as a premier animation studio.”
Around 90%, or the “core group” of TeamTO’s circa-39 staff have kept their jobs, Balsamo said, although they were unable to retain the previous ownership “for various reasons.”
He said “a handful of poor decisions at a bad time” combined with the 2023 U.S. labor strikes spelt the end for the previous iteration of TeamTO.
“They decided to expand into a huge studio that cost way too much money to sustain because they were under the impression that they were going to handle productions in double digits,” he added. “When the service projects stopped coming in, the money dried up. It just boiled down to that decision.”
Balsamo notes it is a rocky time for animation but said “with that comes opportunity.”
The new owner said he is equally happy working with local French players and major American studios, who are out in full force at Annecy this week, and he issued a rallying cry for the industry to come together in a time of strife and in the face of layoffs and the dangers of artificial intelligence.
“I think we’re at an inflection point,” added Balsamo. “Tribalism has to go. At the end of the day the robots are not going to support us or pay our bills. So studios, executives, partners and broadcasters really need to champion stories. Budgets and greenlights are harder to come by so we need to work together.”
With this in mind, Balsamo’s team will also unveil this week proprietary tech that it will shop to the market rather than keeping in-house including Tangerine, a real-time animation platform that it says increases animator productivity by up to 30%, and Yuzu, a new production management tool offering real-time visibility.
Balsamo was speaking to Deadline at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.
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