Nelvana
Nelvana Enterprises, Inc. is a Canadian animation studio and entertainment production company owned by Corus Entertainment since 2000. Founded in 1971 by Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert, and Clive A. Smith, it was named after Nelvana of the Northern Lights, the first Canadian national superhero, who was created by Adrian Dingle. The company's production logo is a polar bear looking at Polaris, the North Star.
The company is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in North America and it maintained international offices in France, Ireland and Japan, as well as smaller offices in the top three cities in the U.S. Many of its films, shows and specials were based on licensed properties and literature, but original programming was also part of its roster. Although the company specializes in children's media, Nelvana has also co-produced adult animations like the first season of Clone High, John Callahan's Quads!, Bob & Margaret, and Committed.
Nelvana International distributes five shows―Taina, the first five seasons of The Fairly OddParents, The Backyardigans, Mr. Young, and the first season of Horrid Henry from February 22, 2007, to February 2008., its library comprised more than 1,650 cumulative half-hours of original programming.
History
Laff Arts
and Patrick Loubert first met as friends and partners at York University, Canada in 1967. They made films with other students. This was Loubert's first experience with filming; he recalled:The fledgling Canadian television and film industry was developing at the time. Loubert, Hirsh, and York University friends Jack Christie and Peter Dewdney founded a small company named Laff Arts that produced small experimental films. They were joined by Vitaphone animator-designer Clive A. Smith in Toronto, Ontario; Smith's interest was in rock n' roll music, and helped produce the Beatles' animated series and 1968 film Yellow Submarine before moving to Canada to work on short films and commercials.
Smith designed the company's business card; on the front was a suited businessman, and inside was the businessman with the pants down. The company was dissolved after an ad agency advised them that the company's name was unprofessional.
Nelvana
Nelvana was founded by Hirsh, Loubert, and Smith in 1971. Hirsh recalls:They bought ownership rights to a collection of local comic books from the 1940s and then produced a half-hour television documentary focused on Canadian comics for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Their two-year travelling tour of the art from the National Gallery of Canada, "Comic Art Traditions in Canada, 1941–45", gave locals a chance to revisit the country's past heritage in that field. Meanwhile, Hirsh and Loubert collaborated on a related primer from Peter Martin and Associates, The Great Canadian Comic Books. During this time the new company was named Nelvana after World War II-era Canadian comic book superheroine Nelvana of the Northern Lights.
A derelict apartment in downtown Toronto served as the company's first building, and a homemade wooden stand mounted over a toilet was among its first camera equipment. "To create zooms," Hirsh recalled of his early experience with this machine, "we would pile up phone books under the art work." During their first year and a half, the trio lived off a superfluous Chargex credit card that Loubert received at university, spending up to C$7,500 on it before they reclaimed double that cost as their first ever transaction. Under those conditions, Nelvana was involved in the production of documentaries and live-action films during the early 1970s. In the area of part-time animation work, they made ten C$1,500 fillers for the CBC.
Among the studio's first productions was a low-budget CBC short subject series, Small Star Cinema, which combined live-action and animation to tell stories of ordinary life from a child's point of view. It was followed by Nelvana's first ever television special Christmas Two Step in 1975, a similarly styled special in which a girl tries to be a lead dancer at a Christmas pageant. When Nelvana was founded in 1971, their original goal was to make live-action programs involving animation in them during their early days.
Nelvana worked on their first television specials: A Cosmic Christmas, The Devil and Daniel Mouse, Romie-0 and Julie-8, Please Don't Eat the Planet , Easter Fever and Take Me Up to the Ball Game. During that time, George Lucas, who was impressed with A Cosmic Christmas, commissioned the company to work on a 10-minute sequence for the CBS and CTV TV film Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978. This short scene, officially entitled "The Faithful Wookiee", features the voices of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels and James Earl Jones, and introduced the bounty hunter Boba Fett.
1980s
At the beginning of the 1980s, Nelvana chose to co-produce its first feature film, Rock & Rule, over working on Heavy Metal, internationally-produced animated science fiction anthology. Rock & Rule was inspired by The Devil and Daniel Mouse, took five years to produce and cost $8 million, using all of the studio's resources. The film was released by MGM/UA in 1983 with little promotion in the U.S. and was a financial failure. The company survived by working full-time on children's television series. These included its first three live-action franchises, the first season of Inspector Gadget with DIC Entertainment, and the pilot episode of The Get Along Gang.Early in the decade, the company worked on four television specials based on American Greetings properties. They were The Magic of Herself the Elf, based on Mattel's toy line; Strawberry Shortcake: Housewarming Surprise; Strawberry Shortcake and the Baby Without a Name; and Strawberry Shortcake Meets the Berrykins, the last three of which featured the eponymous doll. There were two shows made by Nelvana based on the AmToy properties, Madballs and My Pet Monster.
Despite the successes of their earlier works, perhaps its greatest success at the time came in the form of the Care Bears, thanks to its acquisition of the character rights from American Greetings, the franchise owners. In early 1985, the first film based on the toy line turned the company's assets around, grossing US$23 million in the U.S., and another $1.5 million in its native Canada. Its tremendous success gave way to two more feature films, A New Generation and Adventure in Wonderland, as well as a television series.
In the area of science fiction, Nelvana co-produced Droids and Ewoks, two Saturday-morning series based on Star Wars. At one point, there was talk of an animated CBS show from the studio, based on the BBC's Doctor Who; the plan never came to fruition, but concept art was created by Ted Bastien.
For Orion Pictures' 1986 live-action western comedy, Three Amigos, the company made use of lip-sync animation for a musical sequence in which the main characters sing a song at a campfire, with their horses singing along. In 1987, Michael Hirsh co-produced Nelvana's first self-made film of this calibre, the comedy feature Burglar, which was the first live-action feature film the company had ever co-produced.
Also in 1987, the company, along with independent filmmaker Pierre David, film, video, and television production company Malofilm Group, and home video distributor New Star Entertainment, formed Image Organization, an independent production company that mainly specialized in the thriller genre and tied itself to over 100 films in the international market by 1996. Nelvana and New Star would sell their shares in the company to David and Malofilm in 1989.
In 1988, Nelvana and Scholastic Corporation co-produced a video series of The Video Adventures of Clifford the Big Red Dog based on the 1962 book. It was also distributed by Family Home Entertainment on the video releases.
The company's fourth live-action series, T. and T., premiered in 1988 on Canada's Global network. The show's titular duo was Mr. T of A-Team fame, playing a former boxer named T.S. Turner, and Canadian actress Kristina Nicoll as an East Coast lawyer by the name of Terri Taler. Nelvana faced bankruptcy for the second time when the show's original U.S. distributor, Qintex Entertainment was going out of business; in six weeks, they were saved when they found a replacement. Also that year, Nelvana established BearSpots, a facility for producing television commercials that lasted until 1993.
As the decade came to a close, the revived Nelvana had its next big success with a film and an HBO television show based on Jean de Brunhoff's Babar book series. This franchise, its first international co-production, won many ACE Awards in the U.S. and Geminis in Canada. In September 1989, ABC began to air Beetlejuice, a show co-produced by Nelvana and based on the film by Tim Burton.
1990s
Following BabarIn Autumn 1993, Nelvana signed a multi-year project to co-produce five feature films for Paramount Pictures, with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall co-producing; the first two began co-production the following summer, at a cost of over US$20 million each. Three of the projects were based on books by E. B. White, Clive Barker and Graeme Base ; an original co-production called Mask Vision was also in the works.
However, none of those films ever made it past the finishing stage. During the 1990s, another set of features from Nelvana was distributed by various companies. A 1993 live-action psychological thriller called Malice came out under the Columbia Pictures banner; 1997 saw the studio's retelling of Pippi Longstocking from Warner Bros.; and Babar: King of the Elephants was released in Canada by Alliance Atlantis in 1999. Among them, only Malice would go on to achieve box-office success in North America. Its US$46 million gross was the highest ever attained by a Nelvana co-production, doubling what the first Care Bears Movie received during its original release.
In 1993, Nelvana along with Galaxy Films and De Souza Productions co-produced Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for the CBS network, based on the comic book of the same name by Mark Schultz. It only lasted one season.
In September 1995, Nelvana co-produced Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys based on the popular well-known book series. Tracy Ryan portrayed Nancy Drew while Colin Gray and Paul Popowich portrayed Frank and Joe Hardy, respectively. In addition, Jehene Erwin and Joy Tanner portrayed Bess Marvin and George Fayne, respectively, on Nancy Drew, while Fiona Highet played new character Kate Craigen. The series were based on The Nancy Drew Files and The Hardy Boys Casefiles. However, the series was not distributed well, mostly due to it being in first-run syndication, and both series were cancelled in December.
In September 1996, Golden Books Family Entertainment was in talks to acquire the company for US$102 million, just after having purchased the family video library of Broadway Video Entertainment, a subsidiary of Broadway Video. Many of the company's staff members, including Smith and Loubert, expressed interest in the proposition. But Hirsh went up against it, arguing with then COO Eleanor Olmsted about its possible effects on his institution. Two months later Golden Books withdrew from the deal stating that they would concentrate more on children's entertainment.
In November 1996, Virgin Interactive released Toonstruck, a PC-based adventure game featuring animation and artwork co-produced by Nelvana and Rainbow Animation. The game was set in an animated world using traditional 2D animation, but also featured the digitized likeness of actor Christopher Lloyd as a live-action character trapped in the animated world interacting with the cartoon characters around him. A sequel to the game was planned, but was cancelled due to poor sales.
In 1997, a small computer animation company called Windlight Studios was absorbed into Nelvana's assets. Its co-founder, Scott Dyer, became Nelvana's senior vice-president in charge of production in late 2001.
In late 1997, Nelvana and the United Kingdom's Channel 4 began work on Bob and Margaret, the company's first animated franchise for adults since Rock & Rule. It was based on the National Film Board of Canada's Bob's Birthday, an Academy Award winner for Best Short, which Channel 4 also co-produced.
In December 1997, Nelvana began distributing a syndicated programming block, the Nelvana Kidz Klub, through MediaVentures International, a Chicago-based distributor. The block was offered internationally on a barter program distribution model with one–two hours of daily sections or three–four hours of the weekend block.
In 1998, Nelvana entered into an agreement with U.S. network CBS to program a new Saturday morning animation block for the 1998-99 television season, which would be branded as CBS Kidshow. The block would feature six new series based on children's book properties, and all were to comply with the U.S. government's educational programming guidelines. In April 1998, Nelvana entered into an agreement with ITV franchise Scottish Television to co-produce these new series, and hold distribution rights to them in the United Kingdom. In August 1998, Nelvana acquired Kids Can Press, publishers of the Franklin and Elliot Moose children's books upon which the Franklin and Elliot Moose were based. This turned them into an "integrated company" in which Kids Can's subsequent publications would begin with Nelvana's franchising of those works.
The company's first two computer-animated shows, Donkey Kong Country and Rolie Polie Olie, premiered on U.S. television in 1998.
In March 1999, Nelvana reported a 75% increase in earnings in 1998, credited to increased original production and sales of its library programming, the deal with CBS, and the addition of a publishing business with the acquisition of Kids Can Press. In August 1999, Nelvana announced a US$40 million deal to produce six new series based on popular children's books for a planned PBS block. The six series—Corduroy, Elliot Moose, Timothy Goes to School, Seven Little Monsters, George Shrinks, and Marvin the Tap-Dancing Horse—were launched the following September as part of the PBS Kids Bookworm Bunch line-up. That same month, it acquired the North American rights to its first anime property, Clamp's Cardcaptor Sakura.