Nelvana

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This article is about the entertainment company. For the first female superhero, see Nelvana of the Northern Lights.

Nelvana Limited
Type	Subsidiary
Founded	1971
Headquarters	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Key people	Founders: Michael Hirsh Patrick Loubert Clive A. Smith Current CEO: Paul Robertson
Industry	Animation, franchise licensing
Products	Comprising mainly of children's animation; see also List of Nelvana franchises
Revenue	C$600 million (2001)[1]
Employees	600-700+ (2000-01)[2][3]
Parent	Corus Entertainment
Website	nelvana.com

Nelvana Limited is a Canadian entertainment company, founded in 1971, that is well-known for its work in children's animation, among many things. It was named by its founders—Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert and Clive A. Smith—after a Canadian comic book superheroine of the 1940s. Corus Entertainment, a spin-off from Shaw Communications, has owned the company since September 2000.

A leader in pan-American independent animation, Nelvana is one of the genre's most prominent enterprises outside the United States, and in the entire world. Most of its films, shows and specials are based on licensed properties, mainly children's literature. But, as with most companies of its kind, original programming is also part of its roster. In spite of its status as a cartoon company, it ventured into the world of live action from its establishment up until the late 1990s.

Well-known franchises from Nelvana include Care Bears, Babar, Little Bear, Eek! The Cat, Franklin and 6teen, along with the North American dubs of the anime series Beyblade, Cardcaptor Sakura and Medabots. It also distributes the Nicktoons, The Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom, outside the United States. As of 2006, its library comprises of more than 1,650 cumulative half-hours of original programming.^[1]

Contents 1 History 1.1 1970s 1.2 1980s 1.3 1990s 1.4 2000s 2 Franchises 3 Around the world 4 Notable personnel 5 Influence in popular culture 6 See also 6.1 Related topics 6.2 Related Canadian companies 7 Footnotes and references 8 Bibliography 9 External links

[edit] History

[edit] 1970s

Nelvana started in 1971 when two graduates of York University, Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert, teamed up with a British animator-designer by the name of Clive A. Smith in Toronto, Ontario. Hirsh and Loubert, who had a passion for underground filmmaking, had founded a small company called Laff Arts in the late 1960s. Smith, whose interest was in rock n' roll music, had previously been among the crew for the Beatles' animated series and their 1968 film, Yellow Submarine. Hirsh has commented on the background of Nelvana's founding:

Clive is an animator, and Patrick and I became interested in animation when we were in university together. At the time, there was no production industry per se in Canada, either in animation or in television production. There were stations making local shows, but you didn’t have people making programs for sale around the world. So, blissfully unaware of all it would involve, we decided to start a company in Toronto.

Soon after they stumbled upon a collection of local comic books from the 1940s, the trio acquired the ownership rights. In turn, they made a half-hour television documentary for the CBC focusing on Canadian comics. 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.^[4] Meanwhile, Hirsh and Loubert collaborated on a related primer from Peter Martin and Associates, The Great Canadian Comic Books. Amid all this success, Hirsh, Loubert and Smith named their new enterprise Nelvana—after a Canadian comic book superheroine from World War II, Nelvana of the Northern Lights, who was one of the characters in the Canadian Whites canon.

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 recalls 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.^[1] Under those conditions, Nelvana was involved in the production of documentaries and live-action films. 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 1975's Christmas Two Step, a similarly-styled special in which a girl tries to be a lead dancer at a Christmas pageant.

Then, thanks to new talent from Sheridan College, all of whom were graduates of the institution, Nelvana worked on their first television specials: A Cosmic Christmas (1977), The Devil and Daniel Mouse (1978), Please Don't Eat the Planet (better known by its subtitle, Intergalactic Thanksgiving) (1979), Romie-0 and Julie-8 (1979), Easter Fever (1980) and Take Me Up to the Ball Game (1980). During that time, George Lucas, an aficionado of their work, commissioned the company to work on a 10-minute sequence for the CBS TV film, The Star Wars Holiday Special. This short scene, officially entitled "The Faithful Wookiee", would introduce audiences to the villainous bounty hunter Boba Fett, who would make his first theatrical appearance in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back.

[edit] 1980s

At the start of the 1980s, Nelvana was offered the chance to work on Heavy Metal, an animated anthology of science fiction stories that studios in Canada and other countries were working on. Nelvana declined this opportunity, instead going on to concentrate on the production of its first feature film, Rock & Rule.

Based heavily on the earlier special The Devil and Daniel Mouse, and originally titled Drats!, the film was produced for five years using all of the studio's resources, totalling $8 million. Upon its release by MGM/UA in 1983, it received little promotion in the United States and quickly disappeared at the box office.

The financial demise of Rock & Rule would have ceased Nelvana's operations altogether, had the company never saved themselves from debt by working full-time on children's television series. On its agenda at that time were its first three live-action franchises, The Edison Twins, :20 Minute Workout and Mr. Microchip. With DiC Entertainment, Nelvana worked on the first season of Inspector Gadget, and animated 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's 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 from Nelvana based on the AmToy properties, Madballs and My Pet Monster.

But 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 movie based on the toy line turned the company's fortunes around, grossing $23 million in the U.S., and another $1.5 million in its native Canada. Its tremendous success gave way to two more big-screen movies, A New Generation and Adventure in Wonderland, as well as a television series also based on the toys.^[5]

In the area of science fiction, Nelvana produced Droids and Ewoks, two Saturday-morning series based on Star Wars, along with select episodes of DiC's Dinosaucers. In 1986, there was talk of an animated CBS show from the studio, based on the BBC's Doctor Who; the plan never came to fruition.^[6]

For Orion Pictures' 1986 live-action western comedy, ¡Three Amigos!, the company made use of animatronics in one scene with a talking turtle. In 1987, Michael Hirsh produced Nelvana's first self-made film of this calibre, the Whoopi Goldberg comedy Burglar.

The company's fourth live-action series, T and T, premiered in 1988 on Canada's Global network. The show's title duo comprised of 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 American distributor was going out of business; in six weeks, they were saved when they found a replacement.^[3] Also that year, Nelvana established BearSpots, a facility for producing television commercials that lasted until 1993.^[1]

As the decade came to a close, the revived Nelvana had its next big success with a movie 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 one of the company's products: an animated series based on Tim Burton's Beetlejuice.

[edit] 1990s

Following Babar's success, the studio acquired the rights to animated series based on Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, Maurice Sendak's Little Bear, Joanna Cole's The Magic School Bus and the British comic strip Rupert the Bear. Nelvana had self-made successes of its own during the 1990s, such as Eek! The Cat, Dog City (with Jim Henson Productions) and Ned's Newt.

In autumn 1993, Nelvana signed a multi-year project to produce five feature films for Paramount Pictures, with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall producing; the first two began production the following summer, at a cost of over US$20 million each.^[7][8] Three of the projects were based on books by E.B. White (The Trumpet of the Swan), Clive Barker (The Thief of Always) and Graeme Base (The Sign of the Seahorse); an original production called Mask Vision was also in the works.^[9]

However, none of those films ever made it past the finishing stage. During the 1990s, another set of features from Nelvana was distributed by different companies. A 1993 live-action thriller called Malice came out under the Columbia Pictures banner; 1997 saw Palm Pictures' release of a low-budget science-fiction film called Spaceman, and the studio's retelling of Pippi Longstocking from Legacy Releasing; 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 production,^[10] doubling what the first Care Bears Movie received during its original release.

In September 1996, Golden Books Family Entertainment was in talks to acquire the company for US$102 million, just after becoming the owners of Broadway Video.^[11] 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 Olmstead about its possible effects on his institution. Two months later, possibly with this situation to blame, Golden Books withdrew from the deal without giving any explanation, and stated that they would concentrate more on children's entertainment, an ironic twist of fate given Nelvana's established expertise in that field.^[3][12]

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.^[13][14]

In late 1997, Nelvana and Britain'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 produced.^[13]

In August 1998, Nelvana acquired Kids Can Press, publishers of the Franklin children's books upon which the television series was based. This turned them into an "integrated company"—in which Kids Can's subsequent publications would begin with Nelvana's franchising of those works.^[15]

The company's first two computer-animated shows, Donkey Kong Country and Rolie Polie Olie (with Paris-based Sparx*) premiered on American TV in 1998. That same year, it held a monopoly on CBS' Saturday-morning schedule; the deal included Franklin, Flying Rhino Junior High, Anatole, Birdz and Mythic Warriors as part of the package. In January 1999, Franklin (on the CBS line-up) and Rupert (a part of Nick Jr. since 1991) swapped networks.^[16]

In August 1999, Nelvana made a US$40 million deal with the Public Broadcasting Service to produce its first ever Saturday morning shows, all of them based on popular children's books.^[17] The six series—Timothy Goes to School, Seven Little Monsters, Corduroy, Marvin the Tap-Dancing Horse, George Shrinks and Elliot Moose—were launched the following September as part of the Bookworm Bunch line-up.^[18] That same month, it acquired the North American rights to its first anime property, CLAMP's Cardcaptor Sakura.^[19] The resulting English dub was broadcast on Kids WB! in the U.S. market and Teletoon in Canada.

[edit] 2000s

On April 12, 2000, Nelvana announced its purchase of the Palo Alto-based children's book publisher Klutz in a US$74 million deal—at that time, its largest buyout ever—^[20] and integrated it into its Branded Consumer Products division. The company, founded in 1977, was best known for its children's series, Books Plus. Nelvana's separate subsidiary, Kids Can, started taking advantage of the acquisition by making its output available through Klutz merchandise.^[21]

On September 29, 2000, after almost two weeks of negotiation, Corus Entertainment acquired Nelvana's operations for C$554 million.^[22] Heather Shaw, the Executive Chair of Corus, remarked on this event:

Corus is pleased to gain the expertise of Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert and Clive Smith as they join our growing team. These three visionaries founded Nelvana in 1971 and have built it into a world-class animation company with first-class content and production assets. In acquiring Nelvana, Corus strategically positions itself for further international growth. Nelvana distributes its programs to over 160 countries with 80% of its revenue generated from international sources. Corus will continue Nelvana's tradition of developing highly visible and marketable new productions and further building its extensive international program library. We will leverage this acquisition through our strong balance sheet, and we are truly delighted to welcome such experts into our company.

A year after Corus' purchase, co-founders and co-CEOs Patrick Loubert and Clive A. Smith left the studio for good. Loubert voluntarily left his establishment on November 16 after its new owners eliminated 50 positions from the staff. "The time has come that Corus will stop acquiring for a while and start operating. John Cassaday^[23] has made that clear, but this makes my job less rather than more," he commented on the state of Corus' affiliation and his resulting departure.^[14]

In 2001, the studio began to work on computer-animated feature films aimed at young audiences. So far, only one of them, based on the Rescue Heroes toy line and TV show, has seen the light of day in U.S. cinemas. The rest of them, based on Rolie Polie Olie and the Care Bears, have been released directly to DVD.

In 2001, Nelvana acquired the rights to the English-language version of yet another anime series, Medabots. The following January, Beyblade (in association with Hasbro and Mitsubishi) became its third such property.^[24]

In October 2002, during one of Nelvana's most difficult years, Corus announced that Michael Hirsh, the last remaining co-founder among Nelvana's staff, was stepping down as CEO of the company which he co-founded. The following month, Paul Robertson, former president of Corus Television and head of YTV, took his place, and became leader of the studio's senior management, while it was making its way back to full-time animation. He explained the reason for the status change circa 2003: "We were perhaps getting a little farther afield in doing live action and extending ourselves into a lot of new areas that weren't exactly our core capabilities." With Hirsh's departure, Corus announced a C$200 million writedown for the company; by next August, it planned to reduce the staff down to 200.^{[3][25][26][27]}

The following September, Corus launched Nelvana's home entertainment division. Texas-based FUNimation, along with British company Maverick, has distributed titles from the studio with this label, including Redwall, Pecola, Tales from the Cryptkeeper, Timothy Goes to School and the Disney Channel TV special The Santa Claus Brothers.^[28] Nelvana's newer titles have been distributed by MGM, Lionsgate and ADV Films, which have no involvement with the label.

On May 8, 2006, Nelvana joined forces with ion Media Networks (owners of TV network i), NBC Universal and Scholastic Books, along with Classic Media and its Big Idea Productions unit, to launch qubo, a new children's entertainment endeavour spread across all medium platforms, including video-on-demand on digital cable. The new project will feature new and library programming from the partners, each one producing a new show every year.^[29] The NBC network, along with Spanish-speaking sister station Telemundo, first aired the block on September 9; i began carrying it six days later.

In September 2006, Nelvana was integrated into Corus' children's television division. A spin-off unit, Nelvana Enterprises, was created in the process; it will focus on international distribtuion of the company's shows. Scott Dyer, the studio's executive vice president of production and development, became the overseer of the division, which includes Treehouse TV, Discovery Kids Canada, and YTV.^[30] Doug Murphy, another former EVP at Nelvana, became president of the new distributuion unit.^[31]

[edit] Franchises

Main article: List of Nelvana franchises

Many of Nelvana's TV shows are based on properties from other companies, most of which started in other forms of media. A great deal of them are based on children's and comic books; examples include Anatole, Babar, The Berenstain Bears, Franklin, Jane and the Dragon, Little Bear, Pippi Longstocking, Redwall, Rupert, Tintin, Wayside School and the shows in the Bookworm Bunch block. "We bring good books to life," Michael Hirsh has replied when asked on the faithfulness of such shows to the original source material.^[2]

Nelvana has also had considerable success with animated fare based on toys; American Greetings' Care Bears has been the most familiar example of this. Also, there have been series and specials based on Strawberry Shortcake (also from AGC), Madballs and My Pet Monster (from AmToy) and Rescue Heroes (from Fisher-Price).

It has also translated big-screen franchises to televised properties, such as Star Wars (Droids and Ewoks), Beetlejuice, An American Tail (Fievel's American Tails), Free Willy and The Neverending Story. It has even ventured into the video game world with a show based on Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country.

In the field of anime, the company holds the North American rights to CLAMP/Kodansha's Cardcaptor Sakura series. Also, it holds international licensing rights to Beyblade and Medabots.

As with many other animation studios, there is also original programming within Nelvana's roster. 6teen, Clone High, Mission Hill, and Eek! The Cat among others, are some Nelvana cartoons not based on any other source material.

As of 2006, the studio has made close to 25 feature films for theatrical, home entertainment, and television distribution. Well-known releases include Rock & Rule, the first five Care Bears movies, two Babar films and 1997's Pippi Longstocking.

Live-action has been a part of its mainstay from its early years. The company has had Burglar, Malice and Spaceman as its own feature projects in that area, and has contributed as such to The Star Wars Holiday Special and ¡Three Amigos!. On television, Nelvana has made live-action shows such as The Edison Twins, T and T, :20 Minute Workout, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.

[edit] Around the world

With its historic headquarters in Toronto, Nelvana has offices in Paris and Tokyo; it also owns a distribution branch in Shannon, Ireland.^[1][32] Its Hollywood and London branches closed down in September 2006 as a part of Corus' organisational restructuring.^[30]

In the United States, Nelvana's series have been broadcast on the ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS, NBC and WB networks, and cable stations including Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, Showtime, Cartoon Network, adult swim, and ABC Family. In Canada, they can be seen on Teletoon, YTV, CBC, the Family Channel and Treehouse TV. Elsewhere, they have aired on the Boomerang channel (in Latin America); on Channel 4, ITV, Tiny Pop and the BBC (in the United Kingdom); on RTE (in the Republic of Ireland); and on France 2 and France 3. Nelvana's franchises have been shown on over 360 television stations in more 180 countries, in approximately 50 languages.^[32][33]

Danny Phantom and The Fairly OddParents, two Nicktoons created by animator Butch Hartman, are distributed by Nelvana outside the United States. The latter has been in the top of the ratings for Nickelodeon, YTV and the BBC, and has also been successful among viewers in several European markets and Australia.^[34]

[edit] Notable personnel

Apart from its trio of founders, there have been several key personnel from Nelvana's past and present, a great deal of whom have left the company. Among the most well-known people to work in the studio are Bill Perkins, John de Klein, Wayne Gilbert, John Halfpenny, Peter Hudecki, Vincenzo Natali, Arna Selznick, Laura Shepherd, Susan Snooks and John van Bruggen. Voice work from the company's past and present includes, but is not limited to, Melleny Brown, Alyson Court, Don Francks, Dan Hennessey, Jim Henshaw, Hadley Kay, Bill Kopp, Martin Lavut, Julie Lemieux, Stephen Ouimette, Susan Roman, John Stocker, Cree Summer, Colin O'Meara, Brent Titcomb, Louise Vallance, and Chris Wiggins.

Two former Nelvana employees, Roger Allers and Charles Bonifacio, went on to become staff members at Walt Disney Feature Animation in the 1980s and 1990s. Allers, who worked on Rock & Rule, is best-known as the director of 1994's The Lion King,^[35] and Bonifacio was among the crew of 2002's Lilo & Stitch.^[36] Lenora Hume, from the company's early years, is the senior vice-president of DisneyToon Studios.

[edit] Influence in popular culture

Nelvana had a planet named after it in the Star Wars series, on Cartoon Network's Expanded Universe series Clone Wars. During Chapters 23 to 25, Anakin Skywalker travels to a planet called "Nelvaan". Clone Wars also pays homage to the franchise's animation predecessors in the form of the planet's dog-like inhabitants, who resemble characters from Rock & Rule, the studio's first film.^[37]

Another well-known series in the genre, Star Trek: The Next Generation, has made reference to the company name with a system of five planets named after it. One of them, "Nelvana III", is notably mentioned on the "Defector" episode.^[38]

The "Nelvana Independent Short Film Grand Prize", given out at the Ottawa International Animation Festival since 2004, pays homage to the name of the company. So far, the recipients of this prize have been 2004's Ryan, the Chris Landreth biography about Canadian animator Ryan Larkin;^[39] 2005's Milch, from director Igor Kovalyov;^[40] and, in 2006, Joanna Quinn's Dreams and Desires: Family Ties.^[41]

[edit] See also

[edit] Related topics

• Cinema of Canada
• History of Canadian film
• History of Canadian animation

[edit] Related Canadian companies

• National Film Board of Canada
• Cookie Jar Entertainment (formerly Cinar)
• CinéGroupe
• Atkinson Film-Arts (defunct since 1989)
• Studio B Productions
• C.O.R.E.

[edit] Footnotes and references

[edit] Bibliography

• Stoffman, David (2001). The Nelvana Story: Thirty Animated Years. Toronto, Ontario: Nelvana Publishing Company (ISBN 1-894786-00-9).

[edit] External links

• Official site
• Nelvana at the Internet Movie Database
• Nelvana at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Stamp of the superheroine after whom the company was named
• "Three Men and a bear: Nelvana at 25" by Ellen Besen and Marc Glassman, Take One (Autumn 1996) at LookSmart's Find Articles
• Canadian Jewish News: "Nelvana has found the formula for success" by Sheldon Kirshner

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