How animation gets made now
A 10 billion view counter-argument to the kids media gloom
Most studios spend 18 months developing a pilot before it sees an audience. The founders, on this week’s episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast, push new episodes weekly, adjust runtime based on what viewers do and just crossed 10 billion lifetime views on their breakout show.
Evan Shapiro and I hung out with John Attanasio and Luisa Huang, the co-founders of ToonStar. Both came out of the Warner Bros digital team that handled Time Warner’s early investment in Maker Studios, before leaving to build a studio designed for YouTube and social as the next home for animation.
Their breakout show, StEvEn & Parker, started life with a TikToker called Parker James who had close to 9 million followers and a voice filter which made for a compelling character. It now runs in 5 languages, is 200+ episodes deep, has a Random House graphic novel already on shelves and a streamer deal incoming.
The how (did they get there) matters here. ToonStar built two pieces of technology in-house: Ink and Pixel (machine learning and generative AI driving production speed) and Spot (audience signals that flow back into the writers’ room). They call the combination an agile production loop. Episode length, cadence and character arcs flex weekly based on what the data says viewers are doing, which is the opposite of how television has worked for decades.
“They hold your time hostage.”
Luisa Huang, co-founder, ToonStar
Money is the obvious price of a traditional development deal, but time is the invisible one and it often costs more. ToonStar’s pitch to creators is that you do not have to surrender either.
We also get into what linking production to performance looks like in practice, how the AI conversation plays out when artists stay in charge of the story and their fresh Harper Collins partnership.
If Evan’s recent kids ecosystem report convinced you the genre was struggling, this episode is the rebuttal. ToonStar’s mix of in-house tooling, weekly cadence and live audience signal is one of the more grounded answers to the kids economics problem I have seen this year.
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That’s it for today but before you go: