Brown Bag Films have announced details of a new adult animation production label which will produce and distribute “entertainment for grown-ups”.
Under the banner of Icehouse, the award-winning Dublin-based animation company is planning to expand its reach into primetime all-ages content, while keeping the Brown Bag Films brand for successful family-friendly shows such as ‘Doc McStuffins’.
The first project to go under the Icehouse label is the recently-announced animated feature ‘Deep’, directed by Shane Acker (9). A number of additional projects are also planned and will be announced shortly.
Icehouse will be based at Brown Bag’s Los Angeles office and will be headed by Brown Bag Films co-founder Darragh O’Connell and by producer Gregory R Little, head of Brown Bag Films’ US base.
The new brand will act as a production home for animated comedy and action intended for both traditional and digital distribution. It will also, Brown Bag say, serve as a test bed for new animation technologies, such as the game-engine workflow used to produce ‘Deep’.
O’Connell said of the new venture: “I grew up on a diet of comic books, computer games and sci-fi and now I want to bring some of these ideas to the screen and share what I loved about them in the first place.”
Little added: “We want to have a strong two-way dialog with fans, which means getting content out early in the process. We learn more from producing than developing, and keeping budgets low means that we can take more risks and experiment.”
Established in 1994, Brown Bag Films is one of Ireland’s best known animation companies internationally following Oscar nominations for ‘Give Up Yer Aul Sins’ (2002) and ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’ (2010). The company’s recent productions include ‘Olivia’ for Nickelodeon US, ‘The Octonauts’ for BBC and ‘Doc McStuffins’ for Disney Junior.
