How To Pitch An Animated Project, According To The Netflix Executive Who Bet On ‘Arcane’ And ‘Hilda’

Quebec City native Dominique Bazay has spent much of her career on both sides of the pitching table, first selling shows and later evaluating them. Before spending a decade commissioning and developing animated projects at Netflix, she pitched Canadian productions to broadcasters worldwide, then developed them while running the Quebec-based French-language youth channel Vrak TV.

At Viborg Animation Festival this week, the Netflix director of animated series and family spectacle drew on lessons from shows she commissioned, including Arcane and Hilda, and one she regretfully passed on, Peppa Pig, to explain what makes an idea connect.

“There is no such thing as a perfect pitch,” she told the audience, a mix of students and professionals attending the Danish festival. “A pitch is chemistry. It’s people, it’s creativity, it’s the moment. Sometimes it’s even the weather or the traffic, the mood you’re in. A pitch is chemistry. So there’s nothing perfect about it, and it will never be the same twice.”

What creators can control, according to Bazay, comes down to three fundamentals: be clear, make it personal, and be specific.

Reduce The Idea Until It’s Unmistakable

Bazay described Hilda as one of the best pitches she’d ever seen or been a part of. Its first page used a handful of bespoke images, redrawn from the original comic, and one sentence to establish the central relationship between an adventurous girl and her cautious mother.

“That deck could have been 30 pages, 40 pages. I already knew what the show was,” Bazay recalled of the deck’s first screen. “In one page, in a few seconds, I got all that.”

Producer Kurt Mueller, who helped develop and produce Hilda and who Bazay asked to contribute advice to her presentation, summarized the principle in a quote that Bazay put up on screen and read to the audience:

The #1 goal of the pitch is that you communicate the vision—and what’s exciting and original about the idea—clearly and simply, with an economy of language. You are leading the listener to a destination, and you don’t want them to get lost along the way.

Like reducing a sauce, Bazay, an admitted fan of cooking, compared, creators should keep working until only the most concentrated version remains. Creative talent usually only get one pitch, which the commissioning executive then has to pitch up the ladder themselves. So creating something easily translatable is key.

Make It Personal

There is a conventional line of thinking that warns creators not to make a pitch about themselves. Bazay believes otherwise, and her presentation reflected as much (like her self-referential cooking metaphors).

“I say make it all about you,” she said. “I need to know who you are, and you’re going to demonstrate what kind of partner you are if we make the thing together. Your whole person should be there.”

She recalled Go! Go! Cory Carson co-creator and KuKu Studios co-founder Stanley Moore making his recent experience of fatherhood and real-life pictures with his newborn part of the show’s foundation.

“It stayed with me that long because it was that meaningful to them,” Bazay said.

In another quote from a friend, Apple TV+ executive Tara Sorensen agreed:

I always love when there is a personal story to the pitch … something that gives it purpose and illustrates how deeply connected they are to the story. For me, it speaks to the authenticity of the pitch and the passion they have for sharing their story with the world.”

Specific Beats Familiar

“The most common reason you pass on something is because you feel you’ve seen it before,” Bazay said. “It feels like something you’ve heard or seen, or it just feels super generic.”

She offered some straightforward bits of advice worth remembering while developing a pitch:

• Avoid comparing your pitch to existing shows or mashups of shows. You cannot know the other person’s relationship with existing properties, so better to stay away.
• Replace generic character types, stock imagery, and “slop,” AI or otherwise, with choices that could only belong to this project.
• Know the emotional center, not merely the world, genre, or franchise.

That last one was decisive with Arcane, which Bazay said came to her under a cloud of several rejections from other studios, something that can often hurt a pitch’s chances, fair or not.

Bazay had never played League of Legends and knew several others had turned down the project, but when she first heard the bare-bones story of two sisters orphaned amid violence, it hit her like lightning.

“Within the first few seconds of that pitch, I had tears in my eyes,” she said. “I don’t have a sister, but I could put myself in her shoes. He did such a good job selling us on just how beautiful this story was, no matter how well you knew the game or not.”

Research The Buyer, Read The Room

In her pitching days, Bazay studied broadcasters’ schedules so she knew where a proposed show might fit and what kind of content was already working for them. But being prepared doesn’t mean sticking to a script during the pitch.

“Ask questions of the person that you’re sitting across from,” she advised. “It’s okay to ask, ‘What are you working on right now? What’s the thing that’s really making you excited in your work?’”

Treat every pitch as its own performance, and deliver it with the buyer in mind.

“If you’ve gone to buyer one, two, three, four, five and done the exact same pitch every time, we’re going to feel it,” she said.

Be Memorable For The Right Reason

Mueller brought a record player and specially pressed “dream soundtrack” to the Hilda pitch. Not only did the music give an early indication of the show’s atmosphere, it later led to the recruitment of Grimes for its opening theme.

She shared details of other equally memorable but far less effective pitches, pointing out that it’s easy to go overboard in an attempt to stand out or entertain.

In the case of Hilda, the record deepened her understanding of the project and let her know a bit about the person pitching it; in another case, an attempt at showmanship only distracted from a generic idea and induced a fair amount of cringe in the people being pitched to. Flourishes should communicate something about the project, not compensate for a weak pitch or overshadow an otherwise strong one.

Show Conviction Without Being Inflexible

A pitch is also an audition for a working relationship, in animation more than almost any other art form given the lengthy production periods required to get a thing made. Bazay says she and her colleagues want to work with creators who can explain why they disagree with a note and offer alternatives.

“I know that you have in your heart what the show is,” she said. “People need to know what kind of collaborator you’re going to be.”

Conviction helped Bazay champion Arcane. The dark, high-ticket adaptation was a square peg in an industry full of round holes when she brought it to her bosses at Netflix after the impressive pitch by Christian Linke and Alex Yee. It took months to persuade multiple levels of management to give the show a shot.

Her argument was: “If I can get this in a budget range where you don’t kill me and you don’t fire me, will you let me take a swing?”

But conviction, she emphasized several times, must be paired with curiosity. When someone doubts the project, Bazay suggested asking questions and listening for the source of their concern rather than simply insisting.

Give Your Advocate The Tools They Need To Represent Your Idea

A pitch’s end may mean the meeting is over for the creator, but a buyer who likes the project must now pitch it internally, often several times to different people.

“Remember to arm them with a lot of good information so they can go do their job,” Bazay said.

Like a first date, she said, following a pitch, the artist should wait a couple of days, then follow up and ask for feedback on both the material and the presentation.

There are times that, no matter how good the pitch, budgets, strategy, and timing can prevent a strong project from getting the green light. Bazay also knows, firsthand, that buyers can simply get it wrong. Early in her career, she could not get past a character design in Joan Lofts’ pitch for a slice-of-life preschool sitcom because the protagonist looked like a big pink hair dryer. She passed on Peppa Pig.

“That was a fucking mistake,” she laughed along with the Viborg audience.

The main takeaway from the day was that no set of circumstances lets a creator engineer a guaranteed yes. Pitching takes courage, preparation, a willingness to be seen, and often some luck with timing and external conditions.

“Be yourself, because that’s what’s going to make the pitch clear and unique,” Bazay concluded. “It’s going to be yours. And whether they take it or not, it doesn’t matter, because you showed up.”