The entire cast of Jakers! The Adventures Of Piggley Winks. All images courtesy of and © Mike Young Prods.

If you haven't had a chance yet, check out the new PBS series, Jakers! The Adventures Of Piggley Winks. It looks like a lovely designed, stop-frame animated series for kids. But a talk with exec producer Mike Young, co-founder of Mike Young Prods., reveals that the series of 26 half-hour episodes is done entirely in computer-generated animation, and the producers never intended to mimic stop-motion.

The new series for kids 4-7 follows the adventures of Piggley Winks, a spunky eight-year-old pig, and his friends Dannan the Duck and Ferny the Bull on Raloo Farm in Ireland. While the intrepid trio are enjoying their escapades (Jakers! is their oft-used Irish expression of delight and amazement), American transplant Wiley, voiced by Mel Brooks, offers wild and woolly advice to his all-too-sheepish flock. Each story opens and closes with Piggley Winks as a granddad, telling these tales of childhood shenanigans and life lessons to his three contemporary, rambunctious city-dwelling grandpigs.

Mel Brooks lends his voice to Wiley.

Mike Young Prods in Woodland Hills, California, produces the series with London-based Entara, which created the property.

"This was to be Entara's first foray into kids television, and exec producers Stephanie Gougeon and Louisa Stretton were just beginning to build relationships in the animation industry," said Young, who is Welsh. "As luck would have it, they contacted me about the project just as I was on my way to the United Kingdom. They soon decided they shared a passion to create quality children's programming and that their Mr. Piggley character would make a great show.

They created a show bible containing information about the characters, where they live, the kinds of things they do, what happens in their community, with one thoroughly developed storyline and a half-dozen or so story ideas that indicate how the series will progress.

"Because of the reality and specificity of Piggley's world, we decided to use 3D CGI, and to aim for a quality previously seen only in feature films," said Young. "3D CGI lends a degree of realism, almost photographic in nature that you simply can't achieve with any other kind of animation."

The series is set in two very different, very specific places, so the use of textures, lighting, landscapes, clothing and props was going to be of the utmost importance to the series. Each episode opens and closes in Boston in 2003, while the bulk of each episode is set on Raloo Farm, Ireland in the 1950s.