Our Favourite Pitches From Cartoon Forum 2024
This September saw the 35th edition of Cartoon Forum. One of the most important dates in the animation calendar, the four-day event is a TV marketplace where hopeful creators bring their embryonic ideas before an audience of broadcasters, financiers and streamers in the hopes of seeing their project one day come to the small screen. Each year brings a new country to the forefront, with 2024 highlighting Italian animation. Along with the bounties of cannolis and gelato inhabiting Toulouse’s congress centre, this brought insight into the present and future of the Italian industry.
© Cartoon
The 2024 edition also highlighted some fascinating trends in the industry at large. In a typically child-focused arena, this year saw around 25% of the projects pitched aimed at teens or adults, a landmark statistic for Forum’s decades-long history. This shift has also brought about more experimental ideas, ones that work in different art styles and look to tell stories in unconventional ways. 2023’s Forum was dominated by CGI children’s shows, while 2024’s was full of 2D animation and more adult themes.
The list ahead is full of hope for the future of European animated TV. Highlighted are tales centering people of colour, cultures from across the globe (told by people from those cultures) and queer people, all spun through a diversity of animation styles.
The 4th Planet
© Les Astronautes & Sun Creature Films
Country: France
Format: 13 x 26 mins
Target Audience: YA / Adults
Style: 2D
Few projects have embodied the changing tides of the animation industry like The 4th Planet. The idea for the show has been kicking about for a decade, going through multiple phases of existence. Finally, funding for serious, adult-orientated projects seems to be more available and The 4th Planet was the talk of Toulouse for a couple days.
Coming from French studios Les Astronautes and Sun Creature Films, the show aims to be a grounded sci-fi epic, reminiscent of an Arthur C. Clarke novel rather than a Star Wars movie. After Earth is rendered inhospitable by climate change, the Newtom corporation begins to terraform Mars into a new home for humanity. As with many sci-fi stories, the corporation isn’t completely wholesome, and it rests on one of their employees and one of their enemies to uncover a huge-scale conspiracy. Comparisons with Mars Express and Scavengers Reign will be top of mind (The 4th Planet’s animation style is a close cousin of the latter) but the success of each of them will provide encouragement for the team behind The 4th Planet. Animation is an underused medium for adult sci-fi, and each story in that space is worth celebrating.
Esther
Country: Argentina, Belgium, France
Format: 11 x 22 mins
Target Audience: YA / Adults
Style: 2D
Esther is one of the most visually arresting things you’ll see pitched at an event like Forum. The project was initially developed by Rudo, the animation house formed by Argentinian artist Ezequiel Torres whose work has been featured in ads for Nike, Apple and Cartoon Network. Torres’ style is surreal 2D animation, chalky characters moving across unearthly backgrounds with deeply satisfying fluidity and some incredibly dynamic camera work.
Also involved in the project are Sacrebleu Productions and Take Five, a Franco-Belgian collaboration which bore fruit this year with Flow. Esther is a spiritual road trip movie rooted in Argentinian culture as the titular character embarks on a journey to become a shaman while guided by an Incan God taking the form of a black cat. Its tone is serious and gloriously unsettling, perfectly exhibiting beautiful animation with hints of horror.
Ultra
Country: France
Format: 9 x 26 mins
Target Audience: YA / Adults
Style: 3D, Motion Capture
An original idea from creators Jean Laurent Feurra and Nicolas Viegeolat, Ultra follows a group of superpowered teens in the year 2046 who look to evade governmental control. Centring around a queer Arab woman, Ultra is one of the many impressively diverse projects pitched at Forum this year. Such stories are the priority of one of the project’s backers, We Just Kids who are joined by Les Films du Tambour de Soie and Je Suis Bien Content.
Ultra takes a lot of story inspiration from X-Men comics, being a story about oppressed superpowered youth, but its visual inspiration gives it a unique edge. Feurra and Viegeolat highlighted influences from animation greats like Satoshi Kon as well as live action directors like Wong Kar Wai and Barry Jenkins. This amalgam of influence creates a soft aesthetic with creative lighting and ambitious attempts at simulating slow shutter speeds in animation.
Tonko
Country: South Africa
Format: 52 x 11 mins
Target Audience: 6 to 9 year-olds
Style: 2D + 3D
Triggerfish continues to be a major force in worldwide animation. In the last few years, the South African studio has contributed to Disney+ projects like Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire and Star Wars: Visions while also setting up a location in Ireland for production. Tonko comes from Kizazi Moto alum Tshepo Moche and Terence Maluleke and is another Forum project looking to showcase a specific culture.
Tonko, a boy sent away to his Aunt’s farm for the summer, discovers a family heirloom which allows him to transform into a collection of his superpowered ancestors. Described as a mix between Ben 10 and Steven Universe, Tonko is full of life, heart and is excellently animated in a colourful blending of 2D and 3D.
Queerstory
© Hauteville Productions
Country: France
Format: 20 x 6 mins
Target Audience: YA / Adults
Style: 2D
Queerstory has one of the more unlikely origins of the projects at Forum. Produced by documentary studio Hauteville Productions and being the brainchild of non-binary musician and self-taught animator Imis Kill, Queerstory looks back on ancient history and fairytales through a queer lens, looking to undo rigorous pinkwashing. Kill looked to classic oil paintings depicting tales from stories across the globe and recreated them with their rustic animation style, infusing them with queerness and modern pop culture references. As Kill puts it themself, “If I can make you realise that your favourite fairytale is actually super gay, I’ve done my job.”
The tone of the show oscillates greatly, finding humour in Beyonce needle drops and having Thor take place in RuPaul’s Drag Race, but also looks to grapple with the modern context that these stories exist in. Viking legends are often adopted by right wing groups as representations of outdated gender roles, Queerstory wants to break down conservative interpretations of such myths.
Limbo Ville
© Mago Productions
Country: Spain
Format: 26 x 11 mins
Target Audience: 6 to 9 year-olds
Style: 2D
Following the death of her mothers, Alex sets up a real estate agents for ghosts in the town of Limbo Ville where death and life coexist. Limbo Ville’s structure makes for a great balance between fun and emotional catharsis. Alex’s mission leads to episodic adventures but also allows her to investigate the fate in the afterlife.
The show is being developed by sisters Pilar and Raquel Maestre at Mago Productions who have landed on an art style that brings colour to a land of death. The characters in particular look fantastic, reminiscent of the design of Over The Garden Wall with huge, perfectly circular eyes and massive black pupils. Limbo Ville is more ambitious than it seems on the surface. Making a show about death palatable and fun for a young audience is difficult, as is the show’s goal of normalising queerness in kids TV. This is achieved not only with Alex’s two mothers, but by filling out the cast with an openly trans character.
Mechozaurs: The Voice from Afar
© Laniakea Picturehouse
Country: Poland
Format: 8 x 45 mins
Target Audience: YA / Adults
Style: 2D
Mechozaurs: The Voice from Afar was one of the most talked about pitches from Forum for multiple reasons. Firstly, the basic concept is easily the most trippy. What if, during the Jurassic period, an alien ship crash landed on Earth, imbuing certain dinosaurs with advanced intelligence, giving them a humanoid form and allowing them to reverse engineer the technology aboard the alien ship? That is the origin of the Mechozaurs saga, a gateway into a world of revenge, dinosaur politics and great battles.
The world of Mechozaurs is so deeply thought out by creators Mateusz Kowalczyk and Mikołaj Błoński that the pitch felt like the retelling of a centuries-old myth. Producers Laniakea Picturehouse have given the series a moody look with lots of blacks and blues, giving a grounded, serious energy to a completely surreal idea. Unique about the Mechozaurs pitch is how many projects the team has in the works in different mediums. Already there are advanced plans for graphic novels, anthology novels and even a tabletop RPG, something deeply appealing for buyers looking for the next big IP.
Marie Curie’s Great War
© Tripode Productions
Country: France
Format: 52 min special
Target Audience: Teens
Style: 2D drawings and paintings
Marie Curie’s Great War looks to recontextualise the famous scientist’s story from the perspective of her daughter, Irene. Set during WW1 where Marie was treating soldiers injured on the front line, the special documents Irene’s experience of working alongside her mother and seeing the horrors of war. At once, Marie Curie’s Great War wants to show key developments in medical science, show the inhumanity of war, and show that women have always had the capacity to hold career and family in balance.
Director Camille Almerás and studio Tripode Productions have collaborated to bring the Curies’ story to life through a combination of pencil drawings and watercolour paintings. The effect shown in its teaser trailer was magic. These muted, simple colours are rendered with such skill that these still images alone are given incredible depth.
5 Worlds
Country: France
Format: 8 x 26 min
Target Audience: 6 to 9 year-olds
Style: 2D
5 Worlds has the same IP-driven appeal as Mechozaurs, except this graphic novel series has been around since 2017. Often described as Star Wars meets Avatar: The Last Airbender, 5 Worlds was initially developed by Alexis and Mark Siegel who will oversee the adaptation alongside French studio Andarta Pictures.
The animation showcased in the pitch was simply stunning. The imagery taken from the comics is breathtaking, and this world’s creatures, powers and characters depicted in 2D animation looked phenomenal. The story has a massive scale, a space fantasy that viewers can get invested in season after season.
The Broos
Country: France
Format: 12 x 4 mins
Target Audience: Adults
Style: 2D
Keeping with the trend of hot IP adaptations, The Broos found a very different path into the world to 5 Worlds or Mechozaurs. Its origins lie on Instagram, where creator David Mirailles posted a series of comic shorts featuring a couple of burly bros who have a comedically wholesome bromance. This developed into Mirailles creating minute-long animated shorts based on the characters which were posted on TikTok and Instagram, gaining millions of views.
With the help of Bobby Prod, Mirailles is expanding into TV, with short episodes expanding on The Broos skits, while maintaining consistent posts on social media. The hope is to have a show that brings social media users to broadcast TV and vice versa in order to spend more time with these characters. It’s a bold experiment that could indicate the future of TV if it comes to fruition.