TVKIDS
With commissioners seeking out known IP, the TV Kids Festival convened a panel with Dandelooo’s Emmanuèle Pétry, ZDF Studios’ Oliver Grundel, Hidden Pigeon Company’s Kristofer Updike and Lion Forge Entertainment’s Jeremy Colfer to discuss their approaches to adapting books and graphic novels.
The Feeling Bookish panel, moderated by TV Kids’ Jamie Stalcup, wrapped day one of the TV Kids Festival. You can watch it in its entirety here.
The session kicked off with an exploration of what these IP owners look for when determining if a book or graphic novel is ripe for a screen adaptation.
“The main factor is passion—I need to fall in love with a book or with the characters,” said Pétry, the head of international and development at Dandelooo.
Updike, senior VP of creative at Hidden Pigeon Company, agreed, adding, “Are the characters and stories relatable to the audience we’re going for? And to a degree, does the visual style of the book or comic book translate to a modern audience? That’s not always needed. You can stretch the visual style a little bit. But I do agree that passion is needed.”
“You’re looking for, is there room to expand?” said Colfer, director of development at Lion Forge Entertainment. “Is there more that I want to know about these characters? Other adventures I’d like to see them go on or deeper looks into their backstory that could help bring out some of those themes?”
Grundel, Director Junior at ZDF Studios, also stressed the importance of “strong, relatable characters who are capable of driving engaging stories on-screen,” as well as “universal themes like friendship, courage and identity.”
Stalcup asked the panelists about striking that all-important balance between maintaining the core identity of the material and adapting it to the medium in question.
“There are oftentimes books, especially in the kids’ space, that might lack a real antagonist,” Colfer noted. “You’re having to create all of these extra layers and threads and put the characters in more recognizable situations to help people see that this is now a television series.”
When it comes to adapting older material, “honoring the spirit of that book” is important, Updike added, “but then addressing if there’s outdated cultural norms or if you want to enhance the diversity of it or refresh language and bring humor up to date. Sometimes that’s an issue, especially if it’s something that’s 30 or 40 years old.”
For Grundel, “it all starts with a willingness to truly understand what made the original beloved. Ensuring that the essence, themes and spirit of the source material are carefully preserved in the adaptation, and then you can start to make adjustments to make the material work on-screen and update it for modern audiences.”
The panelists then weighed in on the importance of collaborating with the original author or illustrator when adapting IP. At Hidden Pigeon Company, created to adapt Mo Willems’ work, “CEO Karen Miller instituted Mo Speaks,” Updike said. “He has 77 books and counting. We take one book at a time, and we talk to him about ‘why.’ Why this book? Why this illustration? When we start development on a book or a project, we have all of that history that he has, and then we can align more perfectly with him. He has important personal things and messages in his books that we need to understand. We may disagree, and we may say we can’t do something the way that he originally intended, but we can have that open dialogue.”
Lion Forge has been particularly active in graphic novel adaptations, working with its sister company, Oni Press. “We’re really close to the creators,” Colfer noted. “When you speak to them, you realize they’re limited by page count, by panels per page, all of that. There is a wealth of story and information that never made it onto the page.”
The conversation then moved to the value of known IP in the marketplace today. “A published book is proof that someone has already said yes,” Colfer quipped. “When you’re bringing it into someone, the risk is lower because someone already put their neck out. You’re not taking a flier on something completely original—which we all would love to see more of, but it’s just not done a ton right now.”
Pétry added, “When you bring a book to broadcasters, they know immediately what you’re talking about. You can gain two or three years because you go straight into development. Timing-wise, it’s really valuable.”
“You also get a creative head start with whoever you’re bringing it to,” Updike noted. “They know the past of the book. It’s important that whatever form of written material you’re adapting is well-known. It’s still harder for small, unknown books. They’re almost like original IPs. A well-known book has everything that we’re talking about.”
International success is also helpful, Updike said, but Pétry noted that doesn’t always have to be the case. “In the countries where very few books sold, it’s a great opportunity for [a channel or platform] because you can brand it,” she explained. “You partner with a local publisher and make the books well-known when they’re not.”
Stalcup asked the panelists if adaptations need to target the same original audience base of the book or graphic novel. From Colfer’s perspective, they do not, with Lion Forge currently adapting a graphic novel initially targeted at an adult audience into the “four-quad kids’ and family space,” he said. “If it’s series versus feature, if it’s broadening your audience, if it’s narrowing your audience, you’re always looking for the fastest way to ‘yes.’ So, while the source material is always the North Star, you have to be open to following it to its best natural conclusion.”
Dandelooo is at work bringing the Gaston’s Emotions books to series form. “We decided to develop it for upper preschool,” Pétry said. “When you look at the books, [broadcasters might say], No, thank you, it’s really too young for us because it’s babyish. We took the character, and we aged him up. So, instead of being 3 years old, he’s now 8 years old. We reduced the size of the head and the body and the way he moves and the stories and his friends. It’s the same character, but five years later. There was no way to develop it otherwise. There would have been no outlet.”
“We often aim to expand the target demographic, especially when we develop our teen live-action content for streaming,” Grundel explained. “We aim not to focus solely on the kids’ audience but to broaden the target group, to make it a little bit older. For example, [we use] magic and fantasy elements. It sometimes feels a little bit childish. Incorporating real-life challenges helps to engage older teenagers as well. This is the adjustment you can make with tone, pacing and visual style to make it a little bit older.”
At Hidden Pigeon and working with Willem and his now multigenerational fan base, “it’s about scaffolding the story,” Updike said, “making it very accessible across a smaller demo. When I say aging up, you’re taking something from a 3-to-5 and making it more bridge, like 4-to-7. It’s way harder to do when you’re taking something preschool and trying to make it 6-to-12. I have seen a lot of and worked on projects where you’re taking older and making it younger, and that seems to be a very interesting and fruitful endeavor because you can make it four-quadrant.”
As the session came to a close, Stalcup asked the panelists to share their thoughts on whether this trend toward known IP will continue throughout 2025.
“I thought this year would be the year of new original content,” Updike said, “but we’re not quite there yet. I think we have another year or so of this kind of content being very much in demand. 2025 is a year of IP, brands and so forth. We’re on the cusp of an AI-driven creator model, where creators can use AI to animate their own content and therefore there’ll be a lot of fun, new original ideas coming out and we’ll be able to visually see them. They won’t be the best in the beginning, and we’ll still have to translate them into something a little bit more premium.”
Pétry agreed, noting, “being more creator-driven and more original is more risk. This year, nobody wants to take any risks.”
“Book adaptations have always been a proven and successful model for us,” Grundel said. “I’m confident this will continue to thrive this year. I also see growing interest in building expansive story worlds over books, TV and game and interactive media. We have one project where we are exploring book adaptations in Minecraft and Roblox.”
“When you talk to any buyer, there’s still that ask for known IP, big IP,” Colfer stated. “But at a certain point, the cupboard’s bare. You looked at all the big IP, it’s all optioned somewhere, licensed somewhere, it’s been exploited. It’s going to naturally have to swing back to originals that feel a little bit like they’re evergreen and they’ve been here for a long time.”
