Cloudkid has become the second major Boston animation studio to shut down in the last eight months, following this spring’s closure of Home Movies and WordGirl maker Soup2Nuts.

The four-time Emmy-nominated Cloudkid, which billed itself as a “digital creative agency,” produced animated content and mobile games for a wide variety of clients, including PBS programs like Sesame Street and Between the Lions, while also developing production tools and libraries that it sometimes released for free under open source licenses. The studio also counted Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Scholastic, and Hasbro among its clients.

The founders of the six-year-old Cloudkid, Matt Karl and Dave Schlafman, penned a goodbye blog post explaining that while the studio is successful — they’ve billed over $1.6 million in 2015 alone — they wanted to refocus their goals:

Over the last year, it became apparent that we’ve veered from our original vision and goals, and running a service-based studio was not sustainable for us or our employees. Recently, a friend told us “enough is a feast” and we could relate. We live in a bigger-is-better culture, and we’re told to keep going, keep building, keep making, but to what extent? With so many other studios generating a dizzying amount of kids content for the same platforms, we asked ourself if anyone (other than our clients or employees) would notice if CloudKid ceased to exist. The answer was no. We have made the very tough decision to walk away from CloudKid while we’re on top.

The Cloudkid team isn’t totally disbanding, however. In their goodbye post, they announced that they’ve accepted positions at social robotics start-up Jibo. “Jibo is a perfect fit for our team,” Karl and Schlafman wrote. “It enables us to explore innovative ways of telling stories and building experiences no one has seen; represents a fun and thrilling creative and technical challenge; and gives us the opportunity to work with literally some of the smartest people in the world. Most of all, we’ll be building a fucking robot!”

It’s unclear how the closures of Cloudkid and Soup2Nuts will affect Boston’s already small animation community, but as local animator Alex Berry pointed out on Twitter, it’s no longer business as usual for Boston artists:

For Boston area animators who’d like to connect with other artists, a new organization called Animatic Boston hosts monthly get-togethers. Their next meeting this Thursday will feature a panel comprised of former Soup2Nuts employees.

Amid Amidi

Amid Amidi is Cartoon Brew's Publisher and Editor-at-large.

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