Cartoon Forum Report #4

It was a rough morning. They don't serve the beer in glasses like that. I don't even know why I drew it that way. What the hell was I thinking?

I'm lucky to have survived the day. I was seriously ill this morning. But the result of the late night and the stupid amount of weisbier (that stuff just creeps up on you) meant I missed all the morning's trailers. Word on the cartoon street was that Squidge and the Hardnuts from Cosgrove Hall looked pretty good. The rest didn't seem to impress anyone.

I was sorry to have missed the Binmen trailer. The Forum book says it “encourages children between the ages of six and nine to think about rubbish in a fun and exciting way”. Now doesn't that just sound like genius?

But I did get to see the afternoon projects, having recovered somewhat though still rather fragile. Abercadabra from Calon is about a bunch of kids living in Wales who perform magic tricks as part of their daily lives. Not supernatural rubbish (fun and exciting?). The Paul Daniels kind. The trailer looked a bit, well, plain. It was animated in Flash but the designs were clearly meant to be animated traditionally and that let it down a bit. Ordinarily, I would have dismissed a project on that.

But you see Robin Lyons, from Calon, does such an entertaining pitch every time that I couldn't miss it. And he didn't disappoint. He wowed us all with magic tricks and comedy for half an hour, and Robin is a very funny man. But... he told us nothing about the show that we didn't see in the trailer. He had nothing more to show. But people loved the pitch and went away thinking they loved the show because Robin is just that entertaining.

Paul Daniels indeed.

Aside from that, there was one that looked a bit interested called Myo & Ga from Imira Entertainment. Very cool CG 3D thing that had very simple but striking designs and it just came together to look exciting. I think they may need a bit of help actually turning it into a show though. At the moment, it's a cool visual piece and I didn't feel convinced they could sustain much longer than what they showed. Could turn out to be great though. The trailer looked a lot better than the image below would suggest.

And the rest... was utter drivel. Oh, no, that's not true. There was one called Rintje that was quite bizarre. Rintje is a dog, walks like a dog on four legs and sleeps in a basket. His mother is also a dog but wears a dress and acts like a person. Weird. But something attracted me to it. I didn't go to the presentation though so can't really tell you more than that.

Today there was a tour of the Mercedez Benz museum. I'm not much of a car man, but I thought it was excellent. The building is amazing – like something out of a James Bond movie. And it had loads of classic cars. I never realised just how large those early cars were. This was nice -

Aside from that it was business as usual at the forum. Producers with laptops. Lots of people expressing interest in shows they will never buy. Cartoon Network and Nick buyers stuck together becoming a single entity. Who knows where they go at night? Can't say I blame them - producers probably latch on and don't let go. The Cartoon D'Or ceremony is tonight, where they take 30 minutes of short films and stretch it out to a three hour borefest.