Cartoon Forum Announces Onsite Edition, Lineup Of 84 Projects

Europe’s animation events circuit may just, if all remains well, be grinding back into gear.

With Annecy having wrapped up its hybrid edition, the next major animation business get-together in the calendar, tv pitching platform Cartoon Forum, has announced an onsite edition to be held in its usual home of Toulouse, France on September 20–23. The event “will adapt itself in order to comply with the necessary sanitary measures,” the organizers add.

This year’s edition will see the latest projects from Europe’s biggest and most interesting studios, including many producers whose work Cartoon Brew has written about in the past, like France’s Autour de Minuit, Germany’s Studio Film Bilder, and Portugal’s Sardinha em Lata. We will cover the event in more depth in the months to come.

Explore the full selection here. Here’s the lineup in numbers:

• In all, 84 selected projects have been selected: tv series, mini-series, and specials. They represent a total budget of €326.1 million (USD$388.3 million) and a runtime of 457 hours.
• The projects are produced by 21 different countries. France dominates (as usual) with 33 projects, followed by Ireland with 11 and Germany with eight.
• The most common technique remains 2d, which accounts for 56% of projects. However, the proportion of cg productions has risen from 20% in 2020 to 28% this year.
• Children aged 6–11 are the most common demographic: 41 projects are aimed at them. Another 25 are for preschoolers, while adults and young adults account for 14. The rest are labeled as “family.”

Cartoon Forum is Europe’s leading co-production platform for tv and SVOD animation. In a continent where co-productions are the norm, the event carries great influence. At last year’s edition, which was reimagined as an online affair after a local resurgence of the coronavirus, 83 projects were presented.

Images at top, left to right: “Acorn Elves,” “Hrafn Academy,” “Sacha and the Christmas Creatures”