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Inspired By ‘The Princess Bride', French Animated Movie ‘Pil's Adventures' Pulled In Punters After The Pandemic & Is Now Gearing Up For Some Small Screen Fun At Annecy
Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline's fortnightly strand in which we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it's ever been, but breakout hits are emerging in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. That's why we're doing the hard work for you. The big to small screen journey can sometimes feel an arduous trail but with France's it just felt right. As the TV spin-off of the 2021 big screen hit gets ready to premiere, sales execs will be seeking pre-sales of the inspired project at Annecy this week. The show's promo art will even be emblazoned on the side of shuttle buses. More from Deadline 'Dexter's Laboratory' & 'The Powerpuff Girls' Creators On How They Broke The System At Cartoon Network From Brink Of Bankruptcy, TeamTO Unveils Six New Shows & Adult Animation Push At Annecy Neil Court Joins Coolabi As Chairman Amid 'Warrior Cats' Growth Push And M&A Opportunities Name: Pil's Adventures Country: France Producer: TAT Productions Distributor: Folivari International (previously Federation) For fans of: The Princess Diaries, the 2021 movie of the same name If the thousands of attendees at this week's Annecy International Animation Festival get a bit weary on their feet, they can take up the fest's offer of a shuttle bus across town between the MIFA industry market and enormous screening halls. Emblazoned on some of these shuttles will be Pil's Adventures, a box-office hit of the recent past that is being touted for the small screen at Annecy as the great and good of the animation sector, including execs from all the major Hollywood studios, gather for their annual confab. France's Pil's Adventures show will launch in several months' time and the creative team are hoping this set of 52 mini adventures can deliver sustained success. Spinning off from the 2021 movie of the same name, the show is about Pil, a spunky vagabond girl living in the medieval city of Foggyborough. In the movie, while sneaking into the castle, Pil witnessed the sinister Regent Tristain casting a spell on Roland, the heir to the throne. She realized it was now up to her to find a way to reverse the spell and save the prince's life. The daring adventure turned the entire kingdom upside down and taught Pil that nobility can be found in all of us. Pil's Adventures studio TAT Productions had worked with the movie's creator Julien Fournet on their hit kids show Jungle Bunch for many years and pivoting Pil to the small screen seemed an obvious step as studios look to build out franchises in a risk-averse landscape. 'I was totally crazy about the idea,' Fournet tells Deadline in the days leading up to Annecy. 'I wanted to mix in some comedy with some adventure, keep the main characters and then create more while expanding the universe.' The TV show takes place just after the movie ends. Pil is now a young wannabe vigilante, facing up to dangers including car chases and monsters in each episode as she and her friends take on the world. While Jungle Bunch has lent him great experience in writing dozens of short animation episodes and he was bursting at the seams with ideas, Fournet says the challenge centered around 'making the stories as funny for parents as they are for kids.' 'We are exploring different ways to write things but this was an interesting challenge,' he adds. 'This is maybe a bit more comedy-oriented and less epic than the movies. We are more in the daily life of our characters. It's that freedom you can't have in a film, you can try something new for each episode.' Jean-François Tosti, a producer at Asterix & Obelix studio TAT and animation vet, says the TV version builds off a winning formula. 'The interesting thing with Pil and Jungle Bunch is every episode can be similar but with different stories,' he adds. 'It is an interesting playground for this. We need someone like Julien with a strong imagination to make that happen. With a traditional showrunner, this would be impossible for us.' The movie's inception goes back a fair few years now and the inspiration came from a rather unlikely source, which drove the creative team to go in with the idea that they needed a heroine, not a hero. 'Princess Bride' Provides Unlikely Inspiration 'We were totally agreed that we loved the renaissance movie The Princess Bride,' says Fournet of the beloved 1987 Rob Reiner fantasy adventure starring Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin. 'We wanted this subtle mix of adventure with crazy characters, lots of comedy but also strong emotion behind it. The idea was to have this young, female character who is not really a princess but is a real engine for the script and can be strong in front of the bad guys.' The spirit of the Princess Bride carried the team through the lengthy production period that was stymied by the Covid pandemic and Tosti points out that the movie defied odds by making box office money in 2021 when cinemagoers remained reluctant to head to the theater. '2021 was a very hard time,' says Tosti. 'We sold almost 500,000 tickets, which in normal times would have been maybe 900,000 or 1 million.' The movie went on to sell 1.7M tickets worldwide, was dubbed into English starring Dalila Bela and Carlos Mencia and grossed around $15M for all versions. Tosti was delighted to see the movie perform well in regions like CEE, Israel and the Middle East. Now, having taken over Pil's distribution from Federation Kids, new seller Folivari International has struck pre-sales for the small-screen version in France (France Télévisions), Sweden (SVT) and Switzerland (RTS), with the show likely to launch around Xmas time or early next year. 'France Télévisions is very excited and this could be one of their biggest kids shows for next year,' says Tosti. But all is not well in the animation sector more broadly, Tosti says, as he cites how studios 'grew too quickly' after the pandemic and now 'the ask for animation is really shrinking,' with pre-sales becoming more and more difficult to strike. 'TAT turns 25 this year and this is the first time I see such a crisis,' he adds. 'Producers have to take huge risks to complete a feature or series then sell it. It is a very strange time for animation producers.' Tosti remains optimistic the market will 'normalize' by next year and he feels he is lucky to have risen through the ranks of a French animation sector that has a 'great tradition.' 'Every producer from abroad wants to know why their sector isn't like ours,' he adds. 'When I was a kid I only watched U.S. and Japanese animation and European animation barely existed but now we have subsidies, markets, very strong national broadcasters and are financing first-rate French TV series. This leads to great talent, studios and broadcasters, so we have everything to develop animation.' As Annecy attendees are dazzled by the next Stranger Things or Bojack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg's latest, the success of local shows a little closer to home will hopefully shine through. 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From Brink Of Bankruptcy, TeamTO Unveils Six New Shows & Adult Animation Push At Annecy
Last year, storied French animation outfit TeamTO was on the brink of folding. Today at Annecy, its new owners unveiled reinvention and expansion. The PJ Masks outfit ran into financial problems after 20 years in operation and was bought in late 2024 by Italy's Riva Studios for €2.6M ($3M) after a 'highly competitive auction.' More from Deadline Neil Court Joins Coolabi As Chairman Amid 'Warrior Cats' Growth Push And M&A Opportunities "Je Suis Milhouse": Matt Groening Gets Emotional At Annecy As He Reveals The Motivation Behind The 800-Episode Longevity Of 'The Simpsons' Sola Media Posts First Deals For Annecy Title 'Captain Sabertooth And The Countess Of Grel' Six months on, new CEO Marco Balsamo unveiled a sextet of shows, a push into 2D and adult animation, and new technology. During an Annecy Studio in Focus event that has just finished, Balsamo showed audiences SKWAD!, TeamTO's first adult animated 2D comedy, which is set in the world of MMA, along with Infinity, a cinematic adult action-drama from acclaimed director Jay Oliva. Tapping into Balsamo's love for soccer – his family owns a soccer team in New York – TeamTO is also making Shadow Soccer, an anime-inspired sports drama with supernatural elements. Completing the sextet are What's Up, Eesha?, a whimsical preschool series co-produced with Maga Animation (Italy) and UMedia (Belgium), Greek mythology show Next Level: Odyssey and H.O.M.E., a sci-fi family comedy about a blended household living inside a retired intergalactic battle robot. Speaking to Deadline before the Studio in Focus, Balsamo said CGI will 'remain our bread and butter' but 'we've always wanted to branch out and show a variety of what TeamTO can accomplish, and that is in the 2D and adult animation space.' For the foreseeable future, the indie will take a roughly 50/50 split approach to its original IP work and production services, he added. Balsamo and his team became interested in acquiring troubled studio TeamTO initially to rescue some IP the pair were working on titled Junichiro Jackson – 'In our head it wasn't buying the studio but getting back our IP,' he said – but he quickly realized TeamTO was a 'turnkey' company. 'When we opened up the Pandora's Box there's this incredible team of people,' he added. 'It's a lot more than just CGI. And our job now is to optimize that and do the best we can to instil confidence within our team and our partners that we can re-establish ourselves as a premier animation studio.' Around 90%, or the 'core group' of TeamTO's circa-39 staff have kept their jobs, Balsamo said, although they were unable to retain the previous ownership 'for various reasons.' He said 'a handful of poor decisions at a bad time' combined with the 2023 U.S. labor strikes spelt the end for the previous iteration of TeamTO. 'They decided to expand into a huge studio that cost way too much money to sustain because they were under the impression that they were going to handle productions in double digits,' he added. 'When the service projects stopped coming in, the money dried up. It just boiled down to that decision.' Balsamo notes it is a rocky time for animation but said 'with that comes opportunity.' The new owner said he is equally happy working with local French players and major American studios, who are out in full force at Annecy this week, and he issued a rallying cry for the industry to come together in a time of strife and in the face of layoffs and the dangers of artificial intelligence. 'I think we're at an inflection point,' added Balsamo. 'Tribalism has to go. At the end of the day the robots are not going to support us or pay our bills. So studios, executives, partners and broadcasters really need to champion stories. Budgets and greenlights are harder to come by so we need to work together.' With this in mind, Balsamo's team will also unveil this week proprietary tech that it will shop to the market rather than keeping in-house including Tangerine, a real-time animation platform that it says increases animator productivity by up to 30%, and Yuzu, a new production management tool offering real-time visibility. Balsamo was speaking to Deadline at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France. Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds A Full Timeline Of Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni's 'It Ends With Us' Feud In Court, Online & In The Media Where To Watch All The 'John Wick' Movies: Streamers That Have All Four Films
