Nelvana has bought North American tv distribution and merchandise licensing rights to Cardcaptor, produced by Kodansha, one of Japan’s leading book and multimedia publishers. The 70-part half-hour adventure series, targeted at the US$1.5 billion market of girls aged six to 11, airs on Japan’s public television network nhk.

Under the terms of the agreement, Nelvana will serve as the North American tv and home video distributor and merchandise licensing agent for the series and will retain all broadcast licence fees.

Michael Hirsh, co-ceo of Nelvana, says in a release: ‘Nelvana believes the series promises to generate substantial ancillary revenue from related game products. Like Pokemon, Cardcaptor is filled with an unlimited cast of collectible card, toy and magazine characters that appeal to children and pre-teens. We are optimistic the series has strong potential to build our merchandising revenues and profits.’

The acquisition of Cardcaptor marks Nelvana’s first foray into the world of ‘Anime’ (Japanese for animation), a genre which has generated such profitable productions as Pokemon and Sailor Moon.

In other Nelvana news, the company’s second quarter financial results, for the period ending June 30, 1999 show net earnings up 13% over the same quarter last year to $1.44 million ($0.20 per share). Total revenue in the quarter jumped 46% to $13.4 million, which includes $2.6 million from publishing initiatives. Teletoon contributed $377,000 in equity in the second quarter as compared with $108,000 from second quarter ’98.

For the first six months of Nelvana’s fiscal year, total revenue increased 55% to $24.9 million up from $16.1 million for the same six-month period in 1998, with net income increasing 16% to $2.3 million.