WHAT does seven minutes of tree-grabbing, rock-smashing, water-splashing and fruit-mashing mean to you?
For Nickelodeon’s NickToons Channel, it means their first local animation acquisition. Munki and Trunk is an animated show that has been two years in the making.
It was brought to life by Sunrise Productions - the team behind the successful Jungle Beat series and Africa’s first feature-length animation, The Legend of the Sky Kingdom.
Based in Cape Town, the production house started out in 1998 in Zimbabwe, before moving to the Mother City in 2005.
“The next seven years we created 35 episodes of it. We meet people in Indonesia, Venezuela and Cambodia who grew up watching Jungle Beat, and it’s incredible to see the reach that a little five-minute non-dialogue show can have.
“And as we listened to their stories, we realised that there was something unique about Jungle Beat,” said producer Tim Keller.
“As South Africans, we had the privilege of growing up in the most beautiful place on Earth,” Keller added.
“We lived these outdoor expansive lives where we encountered exciting things, and I think some of those stories in Jungle Beat - kindness, heart, fun and adventure - are really captivating for an international audience.”
Munki and Trunk is written and directed by Sam Wilson,
and the characters are all from Jungle Beat.
“The five-minute episodes are all about different animals in the wild doing something or having something weird happening to them. We had three seasons of it and it was deliberately limited,” Wilson said.
“For Munki and Trunk, we have these characters come together and their personalities come through. It has been a fun, exploratory process to discover who these ‘people’ are.”
It was important for them to add the humanness to the characters for the show to be a real animated series.
Speaking at the media launch yesterday, channel director Tasania Parsadh said the focus on educational and entertaining content was key to choosing the right kind of shows for their young audience.
“Nicktoons places a strong focus on content, with great stories and characters that empower kids to learn while they play. Munki and Trunk brings in themes of friendship, laughter and humour, cultivating love and awareness of nature and its environment, as well as problem-solving.”
The dialogue-free 3D series is for children aged between four and seven.
“We have soft-launched it in places around the world over the past five months, but for us it’s amazing to be able to launch it on our own TVs and shores,” said Keller.
Sunrise is the biggest animation studio in Africa, but many people probably hadn’t heard about it because they had kept their heads down to work.
“We wanted to take the next step with this brand and we needed to do things like get the show scheduled, and not as just a filler between programmes.”
Keller said the key point for them was to bring something unique, and the kindness theme was a refreshing message to have. The seven-minute series took months to plan. One episode can take as long as 11 months to create.
“With animation production of this scale, it can take about a year to make a seven-minute episode,” Keller explained.
“An episode starts on Sam’s desk when it is being written and moves to storyboarding frames of animation on pencil and paper for another three weeks, before going through the pipelines of production. It can take long before we see the final rendered episode.”
He said it was an interesting challenge to keep the continuity and integrity of the story clear all the way through.
The team have already launched a YouTube channel that has just hit 100000 subscribers, with 7 million views a month.
Munki and Trunk will be flighted on Monday on NickToons DStv channel 308 at 5.15pm.
@mane_mpi