As the Annecy Festival prepares to kick off for 2022, Netflix has announced a raft of new European animated features and series with numerous eagerly anticipated projects.

Ember (Spain) will be Sergio Pablos’ follow-up to the multi-award-winning Klaus [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film]. The hand-drawn animated feature will be “an epic adventure tale of humankind’s quest for fire, told through the eyes of young Dikika, who embarks on an impossible race to a distant volcano to retrieve the precious spark that will save her tribe”. It is to be produced by Madrid-based The Spa Studios.

A Charles Dickens classic will receive yet another screen interpretation, this time with a musical twist. Produced by UK-based Timeless Films and directed by Stephen Donnelly, Scrooge: A Christmas Carol will feature songs from legendary composer and lyricist Leslie Bricusse as it adapts the 1970 feature film that starred Albert Finney in the lead role. The CG animation is due to debut on Netflix in December 2022.

Another UK project will see a number of children’s books written by Richard Curtis adapted for the big screen. That Christmas, the directorial debut by Simon Otto, follows “a series of entwined tales about love and loneliness, family and friends, and Santa Claus making a big mistake, not to mention an enormous number of turkeys”. The CG animation will be produced by London-based Locksmith Animation alongside Nicole P Hearon (Moana, Frozen) and Adam Tandy (The Thick of It, Detectorists).

Also announced is an as-yet-untitled project from animation veteran Steve Box. Box, who won an Academy Award for directing Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film], will team up with Paris-based Superprod Animation for a CG animation that sees a “rag-tag gang of stray cats [being] forced to go undercover to pull off the biggest heist of their lives, posing as the thing they most despise – the pampered pets of suburbia”.

Also announced are four TV series. Amongst them is Bad Dinosaurs (UK/ Spain), based on a series of phenomenally successful online shorts and directed by the multi-award-winning Simone Giampaolo. Mermaid Magic (Italy) is “a groundbreaking animated series about a teenage mermaid princess named Merlinda”, which originates from multi-award-winning creator and director Iginio Straffi (Winx Club [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film]). A twist on the classic fairy tale, The Seven Bears (France) is based on the acclaimed graphic novels by Emile Bravo and is being produced by French animation studio Folivari. Finally, the fantasy-adventure Wereworld (UK), based on the books by Curtis Jobling, will be produced by UK-based companies Lime Pictures and Jellyfish Pictures.

These projects join a growing list of animated titles from Europe, including My Father’s Dragon (USA/Ireland), which will debut on Netflix this autumn, as well as Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and an untitled Wallace and Gromit project from beloved UK animation studio Aardman (see the news). There will also be a new adult animated series by Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare, and Captain Fall from Norwegian showrunners Jon Iver Helgaker and Jonas Torgerson.