Vampirina: The kids’ show that has bite
When the almighty Walt Disney corporation set its sights on bringing to the screen a popular series of children’s novels about a girl vampire, executives at the House of Mouse knew to whom to entrust the job.
“Disney got in touch and we started working on Vampirina in late 2014,” says Gillian Higgins, vice-president of production at Dublin’s Brown Bag Films.
“We’ve been on this project ever since… Working with Disney is a string you want to have to your bow.”
Brown Bag has quietly become one of Ireland’s entertainment industry success stories.
Headquartered in an unobtrusive building behind a strip of pizza joints and hipster cafes, in Dublin’s Smithfield, the company is responsible for some of the biggest hits in children’s television.
Octonauts and Doc McStuffins are among the pre-school juggernauts for which parents have Brown Bag to thank. Having just debuted on the Disney Channel, Vampirina looks primed to become the studio’s latest triumph.
On a tour of the library-quiet studio, Vampirina supervising director, Nicky Phelan, introduces me to the series’ animators. They are responsible for bringing initial ink-and-pencil sketches of the characters from page to TV.
This is achieved with the help of huge, humming workstations, on the screens of which flicker vivid close-ups of Vampirina and her Addams Family-esque parents. The atmosphere is calm, but intense; there is a sense of watching a well-greased machine in motion.
Animator, Matteo Ceccotti, shows me one of the team conjuring to life the show’s “sassy” gargoyle, by acting out the character’s hissy fit. The animation matches, with uncanny precision, the man’s self-righteous flouncing.
“Frozen would have longer to put together, an hour and 20 minutes of screen time, than we would have for an entire season,” says Nicky Phelan.
“You have to be really decisive in your planning, so that you can get through a volume of work at a pace that is sensible.”
“I used to work in features at Dreamworks,” says consulting producer, Norton Virgien, who came to Dublin seven years ago to oversee Doc McStuffins and hasn’t gone back (in a previous life, he directed the Rugrats Movie). “You’d have 40 people in a room and you think, ‘well, do they all have to be there’?”
Brown Bag was set up in 1994 by animators previously with the Sullivan Bluth studio, which was wooed to Ireland a decade previously by IDA tax breaks.
Sullivan Bluth had released a string of hits through the 1980s, including An American Tale and The Land Before Time. But, lacking the resources of Disney, it foundered and, in the early 1990s, went out of business. Irish animation was devastated.
One of Brown Bag’s early commissions was a satirical retelling of Peig for RTÉ (which had a cultish popularity at the time, yet is today more or less forgotten). An Oscar nomination in 2002, for the short, Give Up Yer Aul Sins, confirmed it as a company going places. The real breakthrough, though, was season one of Octonauts, in 2010.
Ever since, the company has expanded rapidly and, in 2015, was acquired by Canadian animation group, 9 Story Media (for a “confidential” sum).
By that point, it had become a major player in animation, largely due to the blockbusting Doc McStuffins, which, since its debut, in 2012, has helped Disney shift more than $500m of tie-in merchandise.
“We’re really proud of Octonauts. I don’t think anyone could have forecast what Doc McStuffins would become,” says Phelan.
“She is the juggernaut of preschool — she’s so huge and has had such a positive impact on all of us.”
Brown Bag has copperfastened its standing as Disney collaborator of first choice. Irish people work well with Americans, says Higgins. They appreciate our creativity and
mischievous humour.
“The Irish-American thing is a good relationship,” she says. “I worked in LA for 12 years. It’s a culture shock — a very different environment. But you assimilate very quickly as an Irish person. You do get that US connection. There is definitely something. They relate to the Irish very quickly.”
With Vampirina, Brown Bag faced a specific challenge: how to make a show about vampires that was spooky, but not scary to young children.
“The reason the Disney executives were excited was that no-one had done a pre-school vampire show,” says Virgien.
“It was almost unheard of: an innocent, lovable girl, who happened to be a vampire and could turn into bat and had a pet with a secret identity. It proved you could make sweet, lovable vampires.”
Compared to Doc McStuffins, Vampirina presented big technical challenges. Animating toy dragons and teddy bears was one thing. Breathing life into Vampirina and her family was more arduous.
“We all know what humans really move like,” he says. “They are hard to animate. We revamped our whole process, challenged our animators to make it fun and compelling.”
Just as Doc McStuffins has the positive message that children should follow their dreams, so Vampirina has an affirmative subtext.
Having moved with her family from Transylvania to Pennsylvania, little Vampirina feels she is not like other children. The takeaway is that you should be at ease with who you are and not change to please others.
“Our shows have had an impact on the world. Doc McStuffins is well known for inspiring kids to be more than they thought they could,” says Norton. “Let’s hope Vampirina will have the same effect.”
“The Vampirina character is about embracing what it is about yourself that makes you different,” Phelan adds.
“She’s someone that struggles with insecurity. In her first song, she sings, ‘what if the kids don’t like me’. That is something every human being can relate to at some level. It is about empowering kids to relate to what it is about them makes them feel the odd one out.”
Vampirina debuted in the US on October 1. When I ask about ratings,I am told it is a question best-directed to Disney. “For us, success means hearing that someone has decorated a cake with Vampirina,” says Phelan.
“Or that someone is going to dress up as Vampirina. What we are aiming to do is tell entertaining stories in a way that is emotionally relatable to our target audience of young children and their families.”
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