TeamTO Brings French Animation to the World

TV Kids shines a spotlight on TeamTO, a French animation studio co-founded by Guillaume Hellouin and Corinne Kouper in 2005.

When Guillaume Hellouin and Corinne Kouper set up TeamTO 11 years ago, the French CGI studio had a staff of around 30 people. The company now has more than 360 employees who work on approximately 300 half-hours of animated programming. The France-based outfit also has a field office in Los Angeles, as well as one that recently opened in Beijing.

“The idea behind the office in Beijing is that there are a lot of big companies in China that have mainly produced content for the domestic market,” says Hellouin, who serves as TeamTO’s president and CEO. “There are opportunities to work as a partner, either for service or co-production, with big media companies in China that have very big IPs only known in China at the moment but that can [travel] around the rest of the world.”

The biggest IP to come out of TeamTO thus far has been Angelo Rules. “We’ve produced three seasons and are ramping up for the fourth,” says Hellouin. “We’ve produced one mobile game [called A Busy Day] ***Image***that was really only on Android, and without any publicity or advertising we made 2.5 million downloads. So that really speaks to the depth of the brand.” TeamTO launched a second Angelo Rules mobile game, Angelo Skate Away, earlier this week. The series, which is a co-pro with distributor CAKE, has been sold into more than 100 territories around the globe, including to Cartoon Network EMEA, Latin America and Asia, Netflix, Super RTL in Germany and France Télévisions.

Angelo Rules has been an exciting creative partnership between CAKE and TeamTO,” says Tom van Waveren, CAKE’s CEO and creative director. “TeamTO created a very fresh and distinctive look for the property, and CAKE subsequently worked alongside TeamTO in refining the concept, putting together the writing team and finding the tone that makes Angelo Rules so unique…. It is the most satisfying co-production we have ever been part of.”

Another collaboration between TeamTO and CAKE is My Knight and Me. “My Knight and Me was unveiled at MIPTV and has already received an amazing amount of interest,” says Ed Galton, CAKE’s chief commercial officer and managing director. “We [expect] sales to be as strong—if not stronger—than Angelo Rules.”

Among TeamTO’s other highlights is Oscar’s Oasis, a non-verbal slapstick comedy first produced in 2010. “This show was sold to Cartoon Network EMEA and Latin America, plus Disney Asia and Netflix,” says Hellouin, who adds that the company is considering doing a spin-off of the series.

Upcoming projects for TeamTO include Take It Easy Mike, another dialogue-free show, which is currently in development. “[Non-verbal is] something that we’ve done in the past and people are still looking for that,” says Kouper, the company’s head of development and executive producer. “We also have now in development something that we’ve not done before,” she adds, mentioning the female-led action series Jade Armor. “It’s driven by a girl who has superpowers. It’s really a ‘girl power’ show.” TeamTO is also working on the second seasons of Activision Blizzard’s Skylanders Academy and Entertainment One’s PJ Masks.

In addition to TV series, Hellouin says that feature films are part of TeamTO’s long-term goals. “We are considering a few projects and definitely want to have a feature film in production for the end of 2017,” he says. “Also, we will increase the production of interactive games, mainly on the mobile [side], but for My Knight and Me we have a prototype for a console game in development. So we will definitely expand the interactive department because we feel we have strong brands that can benefit from being exposed on the interactive world.”