With Love: An Animated Pen-Pal Platform Designed To Add Value To Kids’ Screen Time (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)

In an animation industry marked by layoffs, shrinking pipelines, and a rising tide of independent creators, a small project called With Love is quietly charting a different path. Blending animation, interactive storytelling, and emotional-skill development, the platform is aimed at young people, but is resonating with their parents, too.

Founded by Mick Harrison Brege, with narrative development by Oscar-nominated Pixar story artist and director Dan Scanlon (Onward, Monsters University), With Love is an app that allows kids to exchange letters with animated pen-pal characters living aboard a lonely satellite orbiting Earth. Its gentle 2D design hides a sophisticated storytelling engine designed to foster empathy, emotional regulation, and thoughtful digital communication.

Today, Brege and the With Love team have given us exclusive access to their new animated intro video, storyboarded by Scanlon and embedded below.

“We help young people practice empathy and improve their communication skills,” Brege tells Cartoon Brew. “It’s driven by technology we’ve created, but the core is story — our characters, the worlds we build, and developing children’s emotional intelligence.”

Brege began experimenting with the underlying tech in 2018, but the pandemic clarified the need. “We watched pre- and post-pandemic how it affected kids,” he says. “The anonymity and performative nature of online spaces degraded their social fabric and sense of connection.”

For many Gen Alpha kids, who grew up speaking in short bursts across tightly moderated platforms, long-form expression is often an underdeveloped skill. Brege says that’s not natural, and that the kids want to journal and self-reflect, “they just don’t have an outlet.” With Love aims to create exactly that: a moderated, pressure-free space where writing feels personal rather than performative.

Scanlon, who grew up in the same Michigan town as Brege, joined after hearing the initial pitch. “What attracted me was the idea of using technology to help kids get better at talking to other humans,” he says. “It reminded me of Sesame Street — this idea of reclaiming a medium people were afraid of and using it for education,” he adds, comparing modern apps to early TV.

His first interaction with the app surprised Scanlon. One character gently pointed out that he hadn’t asked many questions about their life. “That’s when I got it,” Scanlon says. “I was being a little self-focused, which I can sometimes be in real life… and it stuck with me. I’m pushing 50, and I realized maybe I could make more of an effort to ask people how their day was.”

A major part of the project’s ethos is the intentional avoidance of generative AI production. Artificial intelligence is only used for personalizing character responses, and it writes its own databases of how characters should respond.

“Our focus has been to minimize AI usage as much as possible,” Brege says. “There are elements that are AI adjacent, but they’re all in a closed system and all built on our own IP, so they’re safe and approachable.”

With Love never uses AI for animation; all character performance is done through Rive, the same real-time animation framework used by Duolingo. Most in-app content is fully written by the With Love team. AI comes into play only in personalization – matching a user’s emotional cues to the most appropriate pre-written responses. This is powered by StoryGraph, the studio’s proprietary system that remixes human-authored dialogue “like a Mad Libs-style puzzle,” as Brege puts it. Even then, all inputs and outputs are moderated to ensure safety, consistency of tone, and a sense of authenticity. The team was also one of the first studios to publicly define its technology principles, outlining how AI should and should not be used in creative production.

Scanlon approached the creative development as he would an animated ensemble series. “We focused on characters you’d want to talk to—and who benefit from talking to you,” he says. The result is a crew of curious extraterrestrials stranded aboard a corporate spam-sending satellite, eager to learn about Earth.

The team also made deliberate business-model choices to avoid monetizing emotional connection though subscriptions and ads. “Paywalling characters, saying ‘You’ve talked enough today’ after asking these kids to open up, is just dark,” Brege says. Instead, the consumer app remains largely free, with revenue coming from libraries, children’s hospitals, and learning environments that use the platform for social-emotional development.

With Love having recently launched the new intro, Brege confirms plans for expanded stories across multiple formats. “We see them in short-form content, longer narratives, interactive experiences — yes to all of it.”

For an industry searching for new creative and economic models, With Love offers a rare combination: studio-level animation craft, thoughtful writing, real-time tools, and a mission centered on human connection.