The atrium in the fx. Center in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany, site of the third annual Cartoon Movie. Photo courtesy of Cartoon.

For three days in the middle of March hundreds of would-be feature producers from all over Europe gathered in Potsdam, Germany to pitch their projects to a motley collection of theatrical distributors, TV executives, bankers, investors and sales agents from across Europe.

Cartoon's Very Real Impact
The third annual Cartoon Movie forum is the brainchild of Corinne Jenart and Marc Vandeweyer, who have been running the European Media programme's animation outfit, Cartoon, for the last 12 years. It is based on the Cartoon Forum, a get-together of animation TV producers, which has been held every year with increasing success since 1990.

Cut outs exhibiting the animation features at the fx. Center. Photo courtesy of Cartoon.

When the original Cartoon Forum was set up, many in the industry thought it was a waste of time. 'None of the important buyers would attend, even if their expenses were paid, so why bother?' they said. Well, the doubters were proved wrong -- a thousand times wrong -- and today the Cartoon Forum, held every September, is an event that anyone who's anyone in the European TV animation industry cannot possibly afford to miss.

Largely as a result of Cartoon's efforts, there is today a flourishing animation production industry in Europe, but until very recently that production was almost exclusively made up of TV series and the odd commercial. Feature films were the exclusive preserve of Disney and, in the last few years, the other U.S. majors.

Attendees view films in the screening lounges set up inside the atrium area. Photo courtesy of Cartoon.

That is no doubt still the view of the situation from sunny Hollywood, because with the exception of the special case Chicken Run from Aardman Animations, European-made animated features simply don't make it in the U.S. market. The fact that several "Made in Europe" movies have made big money in Europe hasn't yet figured on American radar-screens.

The root cause of the problem is that the animated features that get made in Europe have tiny production budgets and get virtually no promotion. Production budgets rarely exceed US$10,000,000 and are often less than $5,000,000; promotional budgets are usually ZERO. So when they do get made, usually after years of struggle to get together a barely adequate budget, they often fail to get an audience in the English-speaking world, even if a few of them do really well in their home market.

Cartoon Movie gives European production firms the chance to meet and exchange ideas. Photo courtesy of Cartoon.

A Thousand Doors
The get-together in Potsdam is an attempt to do something about this by bringing together producers and potential distributors. The three-day event consists of pitch sessions for pre-selected projects, a chance to hold further discussions about projects pitched last year and a whole slew of one on one meetings.

For U.S. producers to get an animated feature off the ground, there are a few doors to knock on, all of them well known and most of them in the business of distributing theatrical movies. For European producers, as the motley collection of so called financiers attending the Cartoon Movie Forum shows, there are hundreds of doors to knock on. Europe remains a very fragmented market. There is no such thing as a pan-European deal and, yet, to finance a feature, a producer needs to access funds from several territories.