Pam Westman, president of Nelvana, spoke to ttvnews about the newest additions to the company’s distribution catalog and its most recent original live-action projects now in development.
Coming out of a pandemic that forced millions of families to quarantine and thus boosted the demand for kids’ content around the world, Nelvana had a very successful 2022 and is ready to continue this upward trend in this new year.
“2022 for most animation studios was a really good year. Studios have been full, talent has been hard to find. And in terms of business and growth, for us it was a really good year”, said Pam Westman, president of Nelvana.
And this year is already off to a good start for the global kids entertainment company, with new additions to its catalog and new production projects in the works.
“One of the shows we are presenting is Builder Brother’s Dream Factory”, the executive revealed. “It’s the Scott’s brothers from Property Brothers, based on them as children and all of the fun adventures you can get into when you are a creative young boy with dreams of creating, building and construction”.
Distributed by Nelvana and co-produced by Sinking Ship Entertainment and Scott Brothers Entertainment, the original series is set to air on Corus Entertainment’s Treehouse in Canada, as well as Discovery Kids Latin America. “And we already have interest from many more partners. I’m sure we’ll have more announcements in the next couple of months,” she revealed.
The distributor is also presenting Agent Binky, which is produced by RedKnot, the joint venture with Discovery. “We will be bringing a fresh slate of episodes. We are into season three now, so season two will be out there with the promise of season three coming soon. We will certainly be presenting that to our clients at Kidscreen”, the executive said.
In the new season of Agent Binky, everyone’s favorite P.U.R.S.T. (Pets Of The Universe Ready For Space Travel) agents are back and ready as ever to protect their human families from aliens, robots and the W.U.R.S.T. (Wings Of The Universe Ready For Space Travel) villain – Chirpy McChirp.
Nelvana is also starting the year off with a bang in terms of production, with the announcement of the brand new show, Millie Magnificent. “It started within our own publishing company Kids Can Press as a book and it was highly successful. It has continued to have strong sales for 5 years. Four years ago we created a short feature film, The Most Magnificent Thing, of extremely high quality. We took that to the film festivals, garnered a lot of nominations and awards. We are really proud of that work. We then developed it into a series called Millie Magnificent”, she explained.
“We have seen really good support. We have a few pre-sales under our belt as well as our own broadcaster Treehouse. We have greenlit that and have started production. We are very excited,” she added.
Nelvana also just greenlit the third season of The Hardy Boys, which is already on air in Canada (YTV), the US (hulu) and internationally through Disney+. “This will be the third and the final season, so we are really proud of that really successful series,” she said
Picking up six months after the events of season 1, the second season of The Hardy Boys finds Frank and Joe intertwined in yet another complicated mystery when a local Bridgeport teen goes missing and a duplicitous corporation moves into town.
“What we’ve seen in the last 12 to 24 months is the live action come back. The demand for that is really high. There’s a lot of new streamers and clients now. Especially for young adults, which is where we work,” the executive explained.
“And what our successful live action projects have done for us is set up interest and experience in this genre. We have created a whole new division of Nelvana called Waterside Studios, headed by Jeff Norton, who has extensive experience in this genre”, she added.
“We expect to have many more green lights in the upcoming years. We are investing heavily in development and will be investing heavily in production”, she concluded.
