Netflix Shores Up Its Original Preschool Slate With 3 New Shows
Having announced four new animated series at the beginning of June, the busy streaming titan Netflix announced three more at the month’s end.
The new shows in question are a trio of preschool originals: Word Party, Kazoops!, and True & the Rainbow Kingdom. They are added to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and Jane, Kulipari: An Army of Frogs, Cirque du Soleil Luna Petunia, and Puffin Rock, as reported by Cartoon Brew at the beginning of June.
Not a bad month for a relatively new face on the cartoon programming block.
Here’s the rundown:
Arriving worldwide in 2016 exclusively on Netflix is the Jim Henson Company’s Word Party. Produced through Henson’s digital puppetry studio, Word Party’s 26×11-minute episodes follow the adventures of four baby animals, whose singing and dancing aims to help build the vocabulary skills of its preschool viewers. Jim Henson Creature Shop’s digital puppetry innovation “allows puppeteers to perform digitally animated characters in real-time, enabling the animation to be more lifelike and spontaneous.”
Also bowing in late 2016 (except in UK and Australia, where it will debut at a later date), Cheeky Little’s Kazoops!, produced in partnership with ABC and BBC, follows the inquisitive young boy Monty and his best friend, a pig named Jimmy Jones, as they seek answers to the questions children routinely ask about everyday life. The stylized CG series from Australia draws on clay animation and 2D graphic art for its look, as evidenced in the teaser above.
Meanwhile, Guru Studio’s preschool comedy-adventure True & the Rainbow Kingdom does not arrive until 2017. The Toronto-based studio is producing the series in collaboration with Home Plate Entertainment and I Am Other. It features not another boy, but instead a young girl in the lead, who with the help of her best friend Bartleby the cat navigates the magical Rainbow Kingdom using her creativity and ingenuity, in search of “harmony and love for all.” Based on work from the Friends With You art collective and slated for a ten 22-minute episode run, True & the Rainbow Kingdom has a heady premise for a preschool show. Earlier, Netflix had ordered a thirteen-episode Justin Time spinoff from Guru called Justin Time: The New Adventures.
