Car­toon­Next 2024: Highlights

Ani­ma­tion beyond Europe. Car­toon­Next is also the per­fect place to reflect on the grow­ing devel­op­ment of ani­ma­tion out­side of Europe. Dur­ing their pan­el, Manuel Cristóbal (Sygnatia/​ES) and Rod­ney Uhler (GKIDS/US) illus­trat­ed ani­me’s vast and expand­ing land­scape, its evolv­ing tar­gets, and future prospects. Ari­ane Suveg (Céles­tine Blue/​FR) and Sébastien Onomo (Spe­cial Touch Studios/​FR) have also high­light­ed the grow­ing poten­tial and abun­dant tal­ent with­in Africa’s ani­ma­tion mar­ket and empha­sised the impor­tance of fos­ter­ing stronger ties between Africa and Europe.

Case stud­ies & suc­cess sto­ries. Dur­ing the event, we delved into the per­spec­tives and future strate­gies of var­i­ous com­pa­nies, includ­ing Bob­byp­ills (FR), a pio­neer in adult ani­ma­tion in Europe, and Stu­dio Meala (IE), which aims to fos­ter col­lab­o­ra­tions with under-rep­re­sent­ed stu­dios across Europe. We focused on suc­cess­ful projects like ​“Samuel”, a stand­out at Car­toon Forum, which start­ed on Insta­gram and expand­ed into a TV, Youtube, and social media series air­ing now on ARTE and RTVE, or Réka Tem­ple’s (Cin­emon Entertainment/​HU) ground-break­ing fea­ture, ​“4 Souls of Coy­ote”, pre­s­e­lect­ed for the Inter­na­tion­al Cat­e­go­ry at the Oscars. 

Mul­ti­plat­form projects. The 8 projects pitched this year orig­i­nat­ed from 6 Euro­pean coun­tries. Most of the selec­tion tar­get­ed Teenagers (3) and Young Adults (3), while 2 projects focused on Chil­dren. Ambi­tious and cap­ti­vat­ing projects with com­pelling trans­me­dia strate­gies were pre­sent­ed, span­ning ani­mat­ed for­mats (TV series, films & dig­i­tal first con­tent), along with gam­ing (mobile, video, live), pub­lish­ing, music, and AR/VR experiences.

Emerg­ing tal­ents at the fore­front. As part of the Coach­ing Pro­gramme tai­lored for young tal­ents from 8 local French schools, a day and a half of train­ing and mas­ter­class­es were organ­ised. This year, we intro­duced the Port­fo­lio Review ses­sion, where small groups of stu­dents were paired with pro­fes­sion­als from the region and beyond. This ini­tia­tive aims to pro­vide them with invalu­able advice and bet­ter under­stand­ing of the indus­try. A Mini-Pitch work­shop also took place on Thurs­day 11 April, where six stu­dent projects were pre­sent­ed to a pro­fes­sion­al jury. The 3 win­ning projects were ​“Les Archives”, ​“Le dernier lance­ment” & ​“Soraya”. More info about the win­ners and their prizes is avail­able here.