‘Animation is the busiest genre around here,’ says established feature film producer Chris Zimmer, and on the heels of his Cannes award-winning Love and Death on Long Island he’s getting in on the action with the animated editorial cartoon series Politoons.

Zimmer’s Halifax-based Imagex is set to shoot two half-hour Politoons specials and three new 30-second editorial cartoons in September, with new Halifax company Adner Animation providing classical and computer animation. (cbc’s The National ran the first seven Politoons during the last federal election.)

Imagex also has an animated feature, The Last Dwarf based on the comic The Adventures of the Evil Dwarf, in the works with Brown Bag Films of Dublin, Ireland. Production is slated for the fall.

A number of new production companies are also looking to expanding opportunities on the animation front, including Prince Edward Island upstart SeaHorse Films, which is developing 26 episodes of the animated series Cowtoons. Company partner Gretha Rose is currently negotiating with a large Toronto company to coproduce the $350,000 per half-hour show aimed at the eight-to-12 set.

One of the first projects greenlit by the new Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation multimedia fund is a 3D computer animated tv series pilot/cd-rom/ Internet package called Web World, hailing from new kid on the block Marshall Media Group of Halifax.

mmg was formed six months ago by company president Jeff Marshall, a Halifax graphics service provider for film and tv projects. Looking to produce high-end animation, special effects and cd-rom content, but lacking the high-priced infrastructure and talent pool required, Marshall teamed up with Atlantic Animation House, CS Design, a graphic design company that produces interactive multimedia layouts, and Web Labs, an Internet Website development company.

‘The strategic alliance has allowed us to offer services that could not be justified within one company and allowed us to grow much more quickly,’ explains Marshall, whose new company has invested more than $3 million in equipment at its new Digital Design Studio, operated jointly with another Halifax company, Munin Multimedia. The studio’s state-of-the-art facility includes sgi equipment and $50,000 Alias workstations.

The Web World project centers on an individual pulled through different worlds who meets up with all sorts of characters along the way. mmg begins production on the tv pilot, cd-rom and Internet property in mid-July and Marshall plans to take the pilot to mipcom in September.

With a lucrative tax incentive and three new Nova Scotia soundstages spurring year-round production, Marshall plans to grow the company not only through proprietary production but also by servicing the animation, special effects and graphics requirements of the increasing number of live-action projects landing in the province.

In the past most producers took their effects work out of Nova Scotia, says Marshall, a situation that’s beginning to change.

‘With the expanded services we offer by clustering the group of companies, new opportunities are coming out of the woodwork that before would have gone of out of province,’ he says. In six months, the group has already doubled its production staff to keep pace with the workload.

Munin, for example, has pulled in a special effects contract for a major American science fiction film and has also picked up service work on a $10-million animation project from Toronto’s Alliance Interactive to design high-definition 3D furniture for a design Internet site which will allow clients throughout the world to make hundreds of thousands of permutations on furniture, textile and fabric options.

Munin is also active in the educational cd-rom market and is currently working on a $100,000 interactive cd on Halifax’s Citadel Hill, which will be sold through the company’s own in-house publishing division.

Also on Munin’s sked is From Africa to Africville, an historical examination of black culture in Nova Scotia that Hubley says has sparked international interest, particularly in Spain, Portugal and South Africa. Another historical project, based on the legend of buried treasure on Oak Island, is being shopped to American publishers including Houghlin Mifflin Interactive in Boston.

‘The cd-rom market, especially educational product, is booming,’ says Hubley, whose company has an aggressive international marketing division. Hubley is projecting Munin’s 1997 revenues to ring in at around $3 million, up from last year’s $750,000.

mmg is seeking to foster a leading-edge animation/effects/multimedia industry in Nova Scotia by bolstering the talent base. Currently there are less than 10 film animators with training on sgi and Alias software, a situation soon to change, says Marshall.

Munin and mmg have opened a computer industry training center at Digital Design, privately financed among seven companies and offering training in everything from animation, cd-rom and multimedia work to special effects, graphics, editing and audio post, as well as interning students with local film and tv producers.

The center’s first class of 19 students will graduate at the end of the month, and Marshall reports 200% job placement throughout the Atlantic region (90% in Halifax). ‘The students are using the same equipment that’s at Industrial Light and Magic and Disney,’ he says. ‘Their work is equal to what’s coming out of Sheridan College in Ontario.’

‘There is still the opinion in the rest of Canada that we can’t do animation here,’ adds Hubley. Their goal, he says, is not only to show that Atlantic producers can do it, but prove their animation to be world-class.