Cloudco Entertainment Takes Shape

Sean Gorman, the president of Cloudco Entertainment, talks to TV Kids about the newly rebranded company.

Earlier this year, American Greetings Entertainment—the IP, entertainment and outbound licensing division of American Greetings Corporation—formally rebranded as Cloudco Entertainment, with the new name and logo reflecting a spin-off into its own stand-alone entity. “Becoming Cloudco has been about more than a new name, but a new company,” says Sean Gorman, the president of Cloudco Entertainment, which has inherited the entire library of new and classic brands, including Care Bears, Holly Hobbie and Tinpo.

With the rebrand, long-time owners the Weiss family retains 100-percent ownership of Cloudco, which will continue with all of the former marketing initiatives, content development and production activities, and consumer product programs and partnerships.

Currently, there’s “tons” in store for the Care Bears franchise, notes Gorman. “We have an all-new 2D-animated TV series—Care Bears: Unlock the Magic—coming out in January on Boomerang in the U.S., Tiny Pop in the U.K. and lots more territories that we’ll announce in the months ahead. It is a complete brand update, with new characters and an environment that includes regular 11-minute episodes as well as specials and a series of shorts. We are also in development on a live-action/animated feature film with a major Hollywood studio.”

Cloudco is also working on the production of an all-new Holly Hobbie live-action show with Aircraft Pictures and Wexworks Media for Hulu, Family Channel in Canada and Universal Kids. “This is all at once the reinvention of a beloved classic character, our very first live-action series and a beautifully produced [program of] which we are extremely proud,” says Gorman. “Played by the incredibly talented Ruby Jay, Holly Hobbie is a 13-year-old coming of age in her bucolic small town. We’re excited by its initial reception as a Hulu original series and will be announcing lots of international pickups shortly.”

Then there is Tinpo, a new animated show produced for CBeebies with OLM/Sprite Animation and Dentsu. “Tinpo and his team are the superhero imagineers of their world; they use tons of visual trial and error to design and construct solutions to problems that are always the most fun and unpredictable, versus the practical and boring of our own world,” says Gorman. “This is our first-ever CBeebies-commissioned series and our first-ever co-production with Dentsu, and the first time we’ve done production work both in the U.K. and in Japan.”

In addition, Cloudco is in production on an animated sitcom titled Boy, Girl, Dog, Cat, Mouse, Cheese for commissioning broadcasters BBC and Gulli, according to Gorman. The company is also “working on several development projects with broadcasters and other partners on relaunches of some of our other classic ’80s brands like The Get Along Gang as an animated TV series and Madballs as a live-action/animated feature film, as well as a half-dozen new IP projects across many mediums, including stop-motion, live action, 2D animation and CGI.”