With a full-time licensing division in-house, Toronto’s Decode Entertainment is a perfect example of a smaller player partnering with international agents and reps. When it comes to the merchandising of Decode’s series (coproduced with C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures) Angela Anaconda, Honest Art is responsible for the management of the property internationally, Saban for the u.s. and Studio Licensing for Canada.

Angela Anaconda, an animated tween series, is a distinctive-looking 2D creation (budgeted at $490,000 an episode) that tells the story of Angela, ‘a normal kid with normal frustrations,’ says Beth Stevenson, a partner in Decode and a producer on Angela.

Angela herself is eight years old, but the viewing audience is slightly older. ‘Because of some of the writing and the visual style we’re finding our core audience is nine to 14. Two of her closest friends are males and she’s not the most feminine kid on the block, so we’re getting a fair amount of boy viewers. We’re also getting 35-year-olds watching,’ Stevenson says.

But without question, Angela’s target is tween girls, particularly for merchandising, which includes knapsacks, day-timers, sleepwear, electronic items and accessories such as purses, hair clips, cell phone holders, cd holders and cosmetics bags.

‘When you’re getting into tweens it’s them making the purchasing decision themselves. Our best place to be would be a group of girls at school all watching Angela and all into the accessories to go with it.’

But plans for Angela – who had her own short before the recent Digimon movie and is herself being developed for a feature – don’t include just any old run-of-the-mill product.

‘We’ve put a merchandising and licensing plan together,’ says Stevenson. ‘And because Angela is so unique and special, we’ve gone after more specialist licensees.’ Like Fun 4 All, the specialist toy licensee responsible for much of the South Park merchandise.

‘A lot of the licensees we’re looking at have a more quirky bent to them,’ says Kym Hyde, line producer of Angela Anaconda.

Just the same, Decode has retained enough control to ensure it has the ultimate say over the use of its property.

‘We have two sets of approvals that we carry through the entire world. On the contract side we have the right to approve all deals, and all product on the creative side,’ says Hyde. ‘It’s a huge machine that runs throughout the world. It is exciting to the profile of your product. Especially Angela, where she’s extremely intelligent but she does have a tendency to get quite upset and take revenge on people through her fantasies. We spend a huge amount of time developing the show and the character and we walk a very fine line. We don’t want her portrayed in the marketplace as violent.’

‘The world is a very big place and contractually things are put in place,’ says Stevenson. ‘However, are you going to start in on a litigious situation with someone in [some territory] because they did bed socks you didn’t like? We’ll try to maintain as much control as we can. You pick your battles.’ *

-www.decode-ent.com