Tonko House, the studio founded by filmmakers Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi, has partnered with Hulu in Japan to co-produce a short-form series based on the characters from their 2015 Oscar-nominated short, The Dam Keeper.
Tonko will produce 10 five-minute episodes centering on the friendship between the main characters from the short, Pig and Fox. The series will begin airing on Hulu Japan in the summer of 2017. (Hulu Japan is owned by Nippon TV and operates separately from the U.S.-based company, which is a partnership between Disney, 21st Century Fox, NBCUniversal, and Time Warner.)
Erick Oh, who served as the animation supervisor on the original Dam Keeper short, recently left Pixar, where has was an animator on Monsters University, Inside Out and Finding Dory among other films, to join Tonko House. He will direct the series in-house at Tonko’s Berkeley, California headquarters. Kondo and Tsutsumi will serve as executive producers.