Animation: What happened to ... ?

“Coming in 2013!” Many movies that are announced never come out. Two that were announced in 2013 as “coming soon” and then disappeared seem to be unfortunate M.I.A.s, from Flayrah’s point of view.

Oggy and the Cockroaches: The Movie. “Ever since the world was born, two forces have been locked in perpetual battle. Their struggle is so Manichean, so ferocious, so Herculean that it makes the clash between good and evil look like a game of checkers! This ancestral duel is so ancient and so merciless that it can only be...Oggy against the Cockroaches!” The trailer, featuring the eternal battle between cats and cockroaches “from the Stone Age to the Space Age”, shows an imaginative mixture of animation styles, with the Stone Age and Medieval age in traditional 2D cartoon animation, the present as a mixture of cartoon and computer graphic imagery, and the futuristic Space Age sequences in all CGI.

Did you ever hear of Oggy and the Cockroaches: The Movie? Did you ever hear of an Oggy and the Cockroaches regular animated TV series? Then you’re not French, Indian, or Vietnamese. Oggy et les Cafards, 7 minutes an episode, has been broadcast in France since 1998, and has sold to Indian and Vietnamese TV. The Indian broadcast appears on the Cartoon Network there, but in Hindi. The two-hour movie premiered in French theaters on August 7, 2013, and since a trailer in English exists, someone is apparently trying to get it distributed in America. Good luck.

“Small Bear, Big Adventure!” Considering that this animated movie features koalas, kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, dingoes, wombats, crocodiles, Tasmanian tigers, bilbys, and the like, it’s not difficult to guess that The Outback, a.k.a. Koala Kid, is made by an Australian studio. Wrong! It was co-produced by The Animation Picture Company in Hollywood (Sherman Oaks, actually), and Digiart Production of Goyang, Republic of Korea, with the movie directed by Kyung Ho Lee.

Released in South Korea on January 12, 2012, its financier, Lotte Co., Ltd. of Japan – the third largest candy/confection company in Japan, according to Wikipedia – wasn’t able to find an American theatrical distributor, and it ended up as a Walmart exclusive kids’ DVD on April 30, 2013. So it has been released in the U.S., but who notices Walmart’s kids’ DVDs? For all practical purposes, it disappeared.

So: one hidden at Walmart, and one still looking for an American distributor. They’re not kids’ cartoons in the sense of animation made for the under-10 market. Check them out, if you get a chance.