An animated skunk plus kung fu and a China location equals the new series Skunk Fu! Unless noted, all images © 2007 Cartoon Saloon.

What's black and white and red all over its nose?

That should be "who" actually, and the answer is a young martial arts student known simply as "Skunk." He's the star of the aptly named series Skunk Fu!, a CW4Kids Saturday morning series that recently joined Cartoon Network's weekday schedule.

Skunk Fu! is the first series out of the Kilkenny, Ireland-based Cartoon Saloon animation studio, an entity previously known for its work in TV commercials. The show has become an international hit currently airing in over 120 countries -- not a bad first try from an outfit started by a bunch of college chums as a sideline to their studies.

Skunk Fu! is the creation of Aidan Harte, one of the company's first staffers, who has since gone on to study classical sculpture in Italy. Thus it fell to Skunk Fu! executive producer Paul Young to trace the show's history. According to Young, its foundation was laid during a 2002 Canadian film shoot. Harte and Hyun Ho Khang, the studio's sales rep, were taking advantage of downtime to brainstorm series ideas. The fact that Khang's agency happened to be named "Skunk" was not far from their thoughts...

Cartoon Saloon's Aidan Harte (left) and Paul Young.

"They were trying to think of a show featuring a skunk. They both love kung fu movies and came up with a kung fu show set in China and developed it from there."

In thinking about who the other characters would be, Harte and Khang took a chromatic approach: "It's basically a very yin-yang concept -- what other animals are black and white?" Seeing as how zebras are exceedingly rare in China, a panda seemed like a far more natural choice. (A natural choice that another studio far away was also making at approximately the same time... )

"Panda and Skunk have a kind of Karate Kid relationship -- that was the kernel of the idea. We wanted an ensemble comedy show with different personalities, so we brought in a lot of characters for Skunk to bounce off of. Also, the idea was that Skunk would learn from the other animals of the Valley. A lot of actual kung fu styles like Crane or Monkey are named for animals -- 'preying mantis' is a kung fu stance. So it was natural to bring in characters he can learn from. After Skunk and Panda, the main characters are Rabbit -- he's cute-looking, but gung-ho, the toughest warrior in the Valley -- and Fox, who's Rabbit's romantic interest.

"It's a very creator-driven show. Aidan did all the character designs and tested them in Flash as he went along. He'd already done an awful lot of work with the software, using it back in 2001 for commercials and coming up with painterly effects, making it look like traditional paper animation, not Flash. Before we went into production, we brought over experienced Flash animators who did a lot of tweaking, turnarounds, and built a library for the series."

Panda and Skunk have a kind of Karate Kid relationship, while Rabbit is a deceptively cute-looking warrior.

The Skunk Stays in the Picture
The studio got its ducks -- not to mention the show's pandas, skunks, rabbits, foxes and assorted other beasts -- in a row for its pitch at the 2003 European Cartoon Forum in Varese, Italy. "We were very nervous beforehand -- it's a very risky thing to do in a way, to expose yourself to so many people at one time. If you do a bad pitch and then bring a show next year, people might go... "

Young falls quiet for a moment, preferring not to verbalize what a failed pitch might have meant for the company's future prospects. "We had a packed auditorium," he continues, "with a lot of distributors and buyers. We had 45 minutes to pitch, to screen our first animation test and a longer trailer. The response was fantastic -- the press said Skunk Fu! was the standout show, the one most likely to succeed. That was a great start for us."

The BBC picked up the series after Cartoon Forum (as did Ireland's TG4) and began airing it this past July. (The show premiered on TG4 on September 24th, two days after its U.S. debut on Kids' WB!) Officially, Skunk Fu! is a Cartoon Saloon, Cake Ent. (the show's distributor) and Telegael co-production for TG4 and Germany's SUPER RTL. The show is produced in English, with the same voice talent heard in both the U.K. and U.S. versions. For its runs in the country of its origin, however, it's dubbed into the native Irish language. As Young likes to point out, the series airs "on every continent" and in the aforementioned 120-plus countries. Its Saturday morning ratings on Kids' WB! (and now on CW4Kids) convinced Cartoon Network to acquire the show as well, where it currently runs as a weekday 10 a.m. strip.

It would have been a huge success for anyone, but was even more so as the maiden effort of the company that began as a partnership between Young and Tomm Moore during their school days in the animation program at Dublin's Ballyfermot College. "We did websites and CD-ROMs on the side," Young recalls. "I did illustrations and Tomm did the animation." After college ended in 1999, the pair set up shop in Kilkenny with a grant from Young Irish Film Makers. "We spent the summer with 12 friends doing a promo/pitch for a feature film. We stayed in business doing commercials and the like and brought people we knew from school as the business grew. Aidan's now a partner, as are [director] Nora Towmey and [producer] Ross Murray."