Pinky Dinky Doo returns for a second season, but this time in CGI. All images © 2008 Cartoon Pizza and Sesame Workshop. All rights reserved.

There are two Pinky Dinky Doos. The first is a seven-year old girl with a high-octane imagination and a yen for vocabulary-expanding storytelling; the second is her show: Pinky Dinky Doo, the latest preschool hit from New York City's Cartoon Pizza. But after a well received 26-episode initial season, production shut down and its production staff went their various ways; that was it for Pinky. Or was it…?

As any parent knows, an irrepressible child never stays silent for long, and Pinky's back in a second season of 26 new episodes (which started in September and are now playing twice daily on Noggin). This time around she and her friends have a larger world to play in, thanks to a switch from Flash to CG animation. Even so, CG hasn't given Pinky a swollen head (she already sports one on occasion in the series); she's still the same high-spirited -- and two-dimensional -- cartoon star as before.

Pinky began life eight years ago in bedtime stories spun by Cartoon Pizza's Jim Jinkins for his then four-year old daughter. "It wasn't pre-meditated as a kid's show," admits Jinkins. Like the eponymous star of his first hit series Doug, Pinky simply popped out of her creator's imagination. With the help of Sesame Workshop, the magenta-haired Pinky appeared in a series of children's books before making the move into animation. "The Workshop was a beautiful partner," Jinkins beams. "They didn't overhaul it, but saw it as natural literacy project."

With Cartoon Pizza's track record in children's TV highlighted by Doug, PB&J Otter, Stanley and JoJo's Circus; Sesame Workshop knew they were making a wise choice. Some 60 to 70 people animated Pinky Dinky Doo at an in-house Flash studio put together by Cartoon Pizza in the Workshop's offices. Even though Jinkins would have liked to make "a zillion Pinky Dinky Doos," the first order was for a mere 26 half hours, 52 12-minute segments in total. TV services programming to preschool viewers generally prefer twice as many, however -- enough to keep their audience watching the series until they grow out of the target age range.

One day Jennifer Monier-Williams, Sesame's VP of Global Television Distribution, got a call from CBeebies, the BBC's early childhood multiplatform service and one of the major players in launching Pinky Dinky Doo. "They said if there was interest [in a second season] they would come in; they were such big partners in the first go-round, you can't ignore that."

Getting the second season together was a challenge as negotiations dragged on for a year-and-a-half. Eventually, Abrams Gentile Ent. came in with a chunk of the budget in exchange for licensing and merchandising rights.

The complex process of getting everybody back on board and financing a second season began. ("I was full of anxiety when this happened," Monier-Williams admits.) Negotiations for a second season dragged on for a year-and-a-half while the window in which the shows needed to be produced was rapidly closing. Broadcasters were demanding a delivery date before they would commit to a series, one early enough so that the first season would still be on the air or fresh in their viewers' memories.

Cartoon Pizza brought a new player into the equation, a company they had been working with on other projects: Abrams Gentile Ent. (AGE). With such production partners as Sunbow, Gaumont and Saban on previous animated series, AGE was no stranger to children's entertainment. Company co-founder Anthony Gentile came up with a season two budget, along with a big chunk of said budget in exchange for licensing and merchandising rights -- and a promise to meet the Workshop's delivery dates. He had a particular company in mind to do the job: Keyframe Digital Prods., a Canadian pre-visual, vfx and animation studio.

"We'd done so much work with Abrams Gentile," says Keyframe's Darren Cranford, director of the 26 new episodes. "We're used to doing TV shows and turning around effects shots in a short time frame. They pitched us to Cartoon Pizza, who said, 'Let's see what they can do.'"

While Keyframe had animated an all-CG movie, several direct-to-video projects and a slew of commercials, they had yet to tackle an entire series. "It wasn't quite like jumping into the deep end," Cranford reflects. "Well, maybe like jumping into the deep end with floaters on." Clint Green, Keyframe's producer on the series, points out that the company has "quite a repertoire of animation behind us. So is it throwing us in the deep end in terms of a series? Yes, but in terms of animation, no; we knew exactly how we wanted to accomplish this. We've developed pipelines to get TV series effects work done, so we knew what we needed to do to make it work."

Season two of Pinky needed to be animated quickly, and, according to Cranford, Flash just wouldn't do. "We've used Flash here before, but on a project this size it's just too slow in terms of being able to move things about. You have to go down levels just to move an arm, then up to another level to move the elbow, then you have to redo the keyframes and tell it what kind of move you want to make. It's not a very artist-friendly system. We wanted to do some things we'd been experimenting with here."