Manchester Animation Festival Selects Seven Projects For New UK Feature Development Lab

Manchester Animation Festival has revealed the seven animated features selected for the inaugural edition of Animation Featured, a new seven-month development program designed to strengthen the pipeline of UK-produced animated features.

Supported by the BFI National Lottery Creative Challenge Fund, with additional support from Screen Scotland and Northern Ireland Screen, the initiative will provide participating producers with development sessions, industry mentorship, networking opportunities, and business and market training designed to move their projects closer to production and financing. The inaugural edition attracted 98 applications from across the UK.

The seven selected projects are:

• Check Out — Dionne Farrell and Rory Waudby-Tolley; producer Dionne Farrell. A supermarket and everyone inside it are transported to a limbo-like dimension, leaving a group of teenagers to uncover a decades-old secret and find a way home.
• Journey to Pop Cloud Island — Georgina Hurcombe and George Caton Coult; producer Georgina Hurcombe. An expansion of the Pop Paper City universe, following a young flying creature who discovers she may not be the only one of her kind and journeys beyond the clouds with her best friend.
• Sgà and the Wulver — John McEwan-Whyte. A family musical rooted in Gaelic culture about an aspiring monster hunter whose encounter with a supposedly dangerous creature challenges everything she has been taught. The film will combine 3D animation with watercolor 2D.
• 24 & 45 — Vicki Rock and Kris Kelly; producer Vicki Rock. A mature dystopian feature about two individuals who challenge a society built around inequality, competition, control, and violence.
• Made of Sticks — Ben Jackson and Baz Sells; producer Ben Jackson. A stop-motion feature blending British social realism and fantasy, centered on a teenager who maintains the decaying windmill that powers a nearby utopian town.
• Karaoke Club — Jamie Badminton, James Harvey, and Maria Pal Pullen; producer Jamie Badminton. Inspired by Pal Pullen’s Filipino culture, the family feature takes place in a world where singing is magic and follows teenager Aria on her journey toward becoming an Idol.
• The Bear and the Piano — Chris Bowden. Adapted from David Litchfield’s children’s book, the stop-motion musical follows a piano-playing bear whose talents turn him into an unlikely star after a young girl and her father discover him.

The teams will spend seven months developing their projects with support from industry mentors including Kensuke’s Kingdom producer Ruth Fielding, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl producer Richard Beek, and Coraline producer Claire Jennings. The program aims to help the projects develop market-ready packages that can attract UK and international investment.

More info about the projects is available on the MAF website.