Channel is Seibert’s company’s most-recent effort to bring promising animation talent and content to mainstream attention.
Elyse Castro’s ‘The Summoning’ will kick off the ‘GO! Cartoons’ incubator series on Frederator’s Cartoon Hangover channels.
NEW YORK AND VANCOUVER -- Sony Pictures Animation and Frederator Networks, a WOW! Unlimited Media company, launched The Summoning, the first episode of GO! Cartoons, on Frederator’s Cartoon Hangover channels on YouTube and VRV from Ellation.
GO! Cartoons is intended to bring promising talent and animated content to the attention of Sony Pictures Animation through an alternative development method. Frederator Studios’ development team took hundreds of pitches and, with Sony Pictures Animation, identified 12 short film projects which Sony Pictures Animation funded. At least one of those shorts will become a series for Frederator Network’s Cartoon Hangover channel.
Fred Seibert, CEO of Frederator Networks says: “Sony Pictures Animation has been the perfect partner in finding these creators and realizing their unique visions. Frederator is dedicated to finding new voices for the world to fall in love with.”
The Summoning is created by Elyse Castro of Brisbane, Australia. The next film in the GO! Cartoons series will be Boots from daughter-and-father team Alison Cowles and David Cowles on Nov. 21. The rest of the GO! Cartoons will roll out every other week.
Eric Homan, Frederator Studios’ head of development, adds: “Shorts shows have been Frederator’s bread-and-butter for decades. It’s as exciting to support fresh talent today as it was back in 1998, whether the filmmakers are in Brisbane, New York, London, Latvia or right here in Burbank.”
Fred Seibert and his team at Frederator Studios have successfully created several incubator series since Frederator Studio’s inception in 1998, including Oh Yeah! Cartoons and Random! Cartoons for Nickelodeon. These yielded hits such as Butch Hartman’s The Fairly OddParents for Nickelodeon and Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. As president of Hanna-Barbera in the 1990s, Fred Seibert pioneered incubator series that discovered talent and shows for the fledgling Cartoon Network, such as Powerpuff Girls, created by Craig McCracken, and Dexter’s Laboratory, created by Genndy Tartakovsky.
The Cartoon Hangover channel was launched in 2012 to bring cartoons from Frederator Studios and other production studios directly to fans. Cartoon Hangover’s most recent incubator lab, Too Cool! Cartoons, brought “cartoons from new and innovative creators all over the world, right to your eyeballs,” including Bee & PuppyCat from creator Natasha Allegri. Frederator Studios went directly to viewers via Kickstarter, and more than 18,000 fans ponied up a total in excess of $850,000 to bankroll the series, a record-breaking amount and the most backed for any animation project start-up.
Sony Pictures Animation is the Academy Award-nominated studio responsible for blockbuster comedy hits such as Surf’s Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania and The Smurfs. The animation studio will be releasing the inspirational feature The Star in theaters on Nov. 17; Hotel Transylvania 3 next July, once again directed by Tartakovsky; and a fully animated Spider-Man movie from the minds of Chris Miller and Phil Lord in December 2018.
Source: Sony Pictures Animation and WOW! Media Unlimited
Tom McLean has been writing for years about animation from a secret base in Los Angeles.
