MIPTV gets underway April 7 at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France for five days of conferences, networking, awards, and deals, deals, deals. To help Canadian animation producers and broadcasters separate the players from the poseurs, the following are half a dozen of the coolest international projects going to market in search of partners and sales. For more information on this year’s event, go to www.miptv.com.

SOCK MONSTERS
Producer: Ireland’s Kavaleer Productions
Style: Animated in After Effects to make the textures of the characters’ fabrics really sing on-screen
Format: 26 x 7
Demo: Three to five
Budget: US$3.4 million
Status: In development. Kavaleer will apply for Irish funding that should kick in about 50% of the budget, and talks are underway with potential partners in France and Canada to get a trailer and some scripts done in time for Cartoon Forum in Germany in September, where they look to secure presales and distribution partners.
Delivery: Early 2010
Premise: Debunking the oft-pondered mystery of where missing socks go, this show follows along as they slip down a magical chute in the back of sock drawers around the globe and end up in Sock World. This parallel universe is inhabited by a motley crew of Sock Monsters, who collect the stray socks of the world as ad-hoc body parts.

THE AQUABATS
Producers: L.A.- and San Francisco-based W!LDBRAIN and The Magic Store, also out of L.A.
Style: Live action and 2D animation
Format: Half-hour eps, the number to be determined by the U.S. broadcast order
Demo: Tweens
Budget: Although a per-ep budget has yet to be hammered out, a pilot ep W!LDBRAIN is bringing to MIPTV cost around US$400,000.
Status: In development. A pilot episode was almost complete at press time.
Delivery: The project is ready to go into production as soon as a U.S. green light is secured, and will be completed sometime in 2009.
Premise: This wacky show centers on an underground indie band that’s developed a cult following. With Jacobs (aka MC Bat Commander) as the lead singer and frontman, The Aquabats have woven an elaborate mythology around themselves in which they claim to be superheroes on a quest to save the world through music.

POPPETS TOWN
Coproducers: Toronto’s Decode Entertainment and Barcelona’s Neptuno Films, in association with OLC Entertainment out of Tokyo
Style: 2D Flash animation
Format: 52 x 11
Demo: Three to five
Budget: US$275,000 per half-hour
Status: In preproduction, with scripts underway and storyboards begun. A curriculum developed wih Toopy & Binoo scribe Katherine Sandford is based around teamwork and elemental science discovery. The project is fully financed through the copro deal and international presales (including Canal J and Disney International for the U.K., Spain, Scandinavia, Italy, Australasia and Taiwan). Decode is now focusing on locking in a Canadian broadcaster.
Delivery: January 2009
Premise: Based on a concept from Japanese creator Jun Ichihara that was developed by OLC into a local-market merchandise program featuring apparel and stationery/gift products, Popets Town stars a gang of critters scooting around their Japanese mall-inspired town solving community problems.

ELFY FOOD
Producer: Madrid-based Ink Apache
Style: 2D animation
Format: 52 x 7
Demo: Three to seven
Budget: US$3.9 million
Status: In development
Delivery: June 2009
Premise: Set in Elf Land, where a community of elves enjoy extraordinarily long and active lives, thanks to super-powers derived from their diet of healthy fruits and vegetables. But an ambitious evil dictator burns all the crops in a bid to make the elves too weak to fight his takeover plot, and their survival hangs in the balance, as a group of youngsters sets out on a quest to find secret and well-guarded stores of elfy food hidden in the land’s most uncharted corners. With ogres and baddies hot on their trail, the elflings must dip into their precious booty from time to time to power-up and escape capture.

BIDDLY BUDS (WORKING TITLE)
Producer: Toronto’s guru animation
Style: CGI animated characters over extreme close-up photography backgrounds
Format: 40 x 5
Demo: Three to six
Budget: US$350,000 per half-hour
Status: In development. An animation test will be ready in time for Banff, and Canadian children’s theater scribe Emil Sher has drafted a sample script. A Canadian broadcaster, international presales and distribution advances will likely comprise the financing.
Delivery: September 2009
Premise: The CGI stars of this mixed-media series start each ep on a new type of unfamiliar terrain. In one sample script, it’s a strange gorge lined with red walls. To help connect clues and identify their surroundings, they consult their handy-dandy fruit and veg flipchart, cycling through a few possible options before zeroing in on a picture of a raspberry. They end the journey with the giant raspberry being revealed in life size as the camera zooms out.

STITCH-UP SHOWDOWN
Producer: U.K.-based blue-zoo (the shop behind Those Scurvy Rascals)
Style: High-end CGI animation to give the sock-puppet characters a realistic look and feel
Format: The shorts are 15 x 1, but the format for the long-form series is still undetermined.
Demo: Eight to 12
Budget: Roughly US$400,000 per half-hour
Status: Shorts are in post-production, and the long-form series is in early development
Delivery: The shorts are almost ready to start delivering, and it will take 18 months to complete the long-form series once it goes into active development.
Premise: In what can best be described as a Celebrity Deathmatch/WWE/Banzai mash-up with sock puppets, Stitch-Up Showdown features a motley cast of 50-odd uber-daredevil warriors – each one uniquely wooly and handcrafted – who go head-to-head in an endless series of ridiculous challenges.

A version of this story appears in the April issue of KidScreen magazine