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 Pil’s Adventures 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 Princess Bride-inspired project at Annecy this week. The show’s promo art will even be emblazoned on the side of shuttle buses.
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 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
Image: 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.
“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.
