Studio Bozzetto & Sardine Productions Pact for The Game Catchers

Studio Bozzetto and Sardine Productions have teamed up for the new preschool animated series The Game Catchers, produced in collaboration with RAI and Société Radio-Canada with the support of the Shaw Rocket Fund.

Created by Studio Bozzetto (Tip the Mouse), The Game Catchers is comprised of 52 7-minute episodes combining 2D/3D digital animation. The show tells the story of a group of five friends and their interstellar journeys to explore planets, with the aim of learning, playing and collecting games so they are never lost again.

The series will be ready by the end of 2021 and is expected to air for the first time on Rai Yoyo in Italy. In Canada, SRC Radio Canada holds French-speaking rights, and Toon A Vision and Knowledge Network the English-speaking rights.

GoldBee has been appointed as distributor for global rights except for Spanish-speaking territories and Central Europe, where ForFun Distribution will manage the rights. KidsMe will manage nonlinear rights for Italy and all audiovisual rights for Spain and Portugal.

Pietro Pinetti, CEO of Studio Bozzetto, said: “The Game Catchers is a one-of-a-kind series. No other animated series has featured playground games or the games today’s adults played when they were young. It is an Italian product, the result of a team of professionals and creatives who couldn’t wait to express themselves with such a creation. We have received tremendous support from our partners, whom we sincerely thank for believing in this idea. The concrete support from RAI, Radio-Canada and the collaboration with Sardine Productions makes us immensely proud. We can’t wait for the final judgment of our most severe critics: the children.”

Andrea Bozzetto, creative director of Studio Bozzetto and series director together with Branko Rakic, said: “We conceived the series with the desire to bring attention back to playground games, those of the past, the ones we all grew up with, while placing them in a new and captivating context for the little ones. This is why the game Capture the Flag will be set on another planet and have a different name: a sci-fi mix that certainly would have had a different flavor if contextualized on Earth. Learning that after having seen an episode, the children will play the game with their friends, in their backyard or on the playground, would in fact be a wonderful ‘goal achieved’ for us.”

Ghislain Cyr, president of Sardine Productions, added: “We were charmed both by the simplicity and the richness of the original concept. As the first Italian co-production ever for Sardine, we are blessed to be working with such a passionate and talented group of people.”