Nick Hallbery from Mother: my Top Tips for Cannes

Top Tips for Cannes

Cannes is nearly here again and coincidentally, my picks for the big gongs both use children’s entertainment as a vehicle. It may or may not have something to do with the fact that since I became a dad, kid’s TV has been routinely pumped into my eyeballs.

First up, is Missing Matoaka, which plays with one of the most enduring, and crucially least accurate, Disney stories (Beauty & The Beast was a documentary, right?) to tell the protagonist’s real story with an alternate film audio. Massive kudos to the team that made this happen, because as a viewer, it looks simple, but the craft required to re-write all the dialogue to match the lip sync to the ‘Pocahontas’ picture is a massively impressive undertaking on its own.

Then from Mother, is Hey Duggee’s Welcome Badge, in which we introduced some Ukrainian animated characters from ‘Makva. The Forest Song,’ to Duggee and the Squirrels, mirroring the lives of recently-arrived Ukrainian children and their new friends here; it is a two-way language lesson delivered in very catchy song format. Making it happen was a herculean production effort but worth it, as the show, and its welcoming message, is something that’ll live in kids’ (and parents’) heads for long after awards season has ended.

Nick Hallbery is an ECD at Mother London.