EXCLUSIVE: The spin-off of Oscar-nominated Aardman animation Robin Robin is in the works at the BBC, with BBC kids boss Patricia Hidalgo seeking co-pro partners at this week’s Cartoon Forum.
Starring Richard E. Grant and Gillian Anderson, Netflix’s Robin Robin was Academy Award-nominated in 2021 for Best Animated Short and followed a young robin who seeks to prove her worth to her adoptive mice family by stealing a shiny star from a human’s house. Directors Dan Ojari and Mikey Please have previously spoken about their desire to make a spin-off and the BBC will be introducing The Adventures of Robin Robin at Cartoon Forum in Toulouse, France, where it is searching for co-pro partners as costs spiral in the world of kids animation. The CGI spin-off is a 52 x 7-min episode series and is targeted at three-to-five year olds along with their parents.
The BBC and Aardman have been on quite the run of late. Shaun the Sheep continues to draw huge numbers for the national broadcaster and the latest Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was the second most-watched TV show in the UK last year, behind only Gavin and Stacey. “If we can get this off the ground it would be madness not to make the show,” said Hidalgo.
At Cartoon Forum, which kicks off today, Hidalgo and her team are also seeking funding for Amelia Fang, which follows a young vampire with a big heart, and pre-school series Let’s Play in Tiger Bay, made in association with Welsh language broadcaster S4C.
Both shows plus The Adventures of Robin Robin require co-production funding to get to screen and Hidalgo told us animation projects are now just as reliant on outside investment as big-budget genres like drama and documentaries. She said her team can only fund around 25% to 40% of each premium animated series.
“When I came in, my strategy was to increase the production values of what we were making but the BBC has not had an increase in the license fee for the past few years and that means with inflation our buying power is reduced,” she added. “We still have to deliver so many hours so we have to work out how to deliver those hours and support the industry with less buying power while the expectations of the audience have gone up.”
The solution, for Hidalgo, is co-production, which means markets like Cartoon Forum are crucial, but Hidalgo stressed that the BBC’s content is not diluted by having co-production partners from outside the UK. “The heart of our strategy is to make content that will travel so we can bring British storytelling around the world,” she added. “We can do this while creating culturally relevant content for our audience.”
With this in mind, Hidalgo unveiled a second season of the BBC and Italian broadcaster Rai’s Super Magic Happy Forest, and talked up the Stranger Things-esque Vanishing Point, a co-pro with BBC Studios and France Télévisions that follows a group of four teens whose world is turned upside-down when their town is overrun by objects with unpredictable powers. The latter comes from BAFTA-winning writer-director duo Tom Gran and Martin Woolley.
“These shows are British IP, British creatives and British voices,” said Hidalgo. She reeled off stats to make her case including that four of pre-school network CBeebies’ top five most-watched animations are UK-made, with Hey Duggee, Bing, Numberblocks and Supertato only surpassed by Bluey.
Hidalgo is a huge animation fan and one of her first moves after joining the BBC from Turner Kids was to triple investment in UK animation for 7-12 year olds, while launching an £800,000 ($1.08M) Ignite initiative to discover the next big British animation. This came as the number of children’s animated series orders on U.S. streaming platforms plummeted from 123 in 2019 to 35 this year, according to research from Luminate Intelligence.
All three pilots that emerged from the first Ignite round, The Underglow, Captain Onion’s Buoyant Academy for Wayward Youth and Duck and Frog, the latter of which is made with Mediawan Kids & Family, have been taken to series. Captain Onion and Duck and Frog will launch next year. Another that started life with Ignite is Rafi the Wishing Wizard, which is the first UK animation to portray the northern city of Manchester and comes from Bluey EP Tom Cousins. Hidalgo said the next round of Ignite is “going really well” and is down to the final six projects after initially receiving a whopping 1,600 entries.
Hidalgo stressed that the BBC is still happy to fully fund projects it really believes in but this impacts other parts of the slate. This was the case with Nikhil & Jay, a show about a British family from a mixed heritage background that “was a wonderful and lovely idea but we couldn’t find a partner.” “It doesn’t mean we will say no but this actually cancels a slot somewhere else because I have to put twice as much money in as I would normally,” Hidalgo explained.
Where is our “British Simpsons”?
When Hidalgo launched Ignite, she said she wanted to find a UK equivalent of The Simpsons, with “roast beef instead of turkey” eaten around the family table.
But nearly four years on, Hidalgo, who spent 15 years working for Disney, said she still hasn’t found what she’s looking for.
“I see pitches every year but it’s just not there,” she added. “It’s a really hard one to crack because you don’t just want to do a copy, you want to do something that is original. I wish we had something but unfortunately I have nothing.”
She remains optimistic, however, and said the quality of pitches she receives on a day-to-day basis are fantastic, “things that you would think are for Netflix or Disney+.”
She is also enthused by being able to spend the week at Cartoon Forum. British animation was virtually excluded from the event after Brexit due to the UK’s withdrawal from the Creative Europe MEDIA program but a special Animated UK Meets Europe initiative, which is sponsored by the BBC, was launched in 2023 for projects seeking co-pro funding like The Adventures of Robin Robin. Hidalgo said she is almost solo this year, however, with rivals like Sky not attending as “they are not investing as much and so don’t have anything to bring.”
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