Corus Entertainment marked its arrival at MIPTV with a trio of deals, including a pact announced Tuesday that will see its Nelvana Studios work with Singapore on a series of direct-to-DVD titles for kids. Corus says its Toronto cartoon shop, together with a subsidiary of Singapore Technologies Electronics, has signed a letter of intent to coproduce animated DTV titles starting with Puff the Magic Dragon and Franklin the Turtle.

The deal follows a previously announced long-term partnership between the two companies to collaborate on animated series and DVDs, the first of which, the 26 x 30 The Future is Wild, is due on Discovery Kids and Teletoon later this year.

Nelvana has already put out several Franklin series, working from the kids books by Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark, and has had the rights to Puff — a character and property born from a 1963 folk song — since 1998.

‘Our move into the digital animation business was a natural progression for the company from our core base of computer-generated imagery,’ said STE president Seah Moon Ming in a statement on Tuesday.

The STE deal follows news earlier this week that Nelvana Enterprises has teamed with Amazon.com to sell animated and live-action content through the latter’s Unbox video download service, while its popular Babar property will go online with Vuze, a new service from U.S.-based Azureus.

The Unbox deal provides download-to-own eps of The Adventures of Tintin, Di-Gata Defenders and others to U.S. customers for $1.99 each. Vuze, meanwhile, will wire all 78 episodes of Babar plus the franchise’s two feature-length films into the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Italy, the U.S. and Russia.

‘Babar‘s popularity the world over… and Azureus’ leading technological peer-to-peer network makes for a winning combination,’ said Doug Murphy, president of Nelvana Enterprises, in a statement.

Also announced at MIP: Toronto’s SpaceWorks Entertainment has sold its first, 22 x 60 season of the sci-fi Ice Planet to Germany’s RTL II, while 9 Story Entertainment has pacted with France’s Moonscoop Productions and Italy’s Atlantyca Entertainment to coproduce an animated series based on the Geronimo Stilton series of kids books.