Toy giant Mattel is teaming with award-winning animation studio Aardman to co-develop a new stop-motion animated television series based on the beloved cheeky penguin “Pingu”.
The series is inspired by the South Pole-dwelling character who has been on screens for decades via a Swiss-German animated children’s television series co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann that ran for 156 episodes from 1990-2006.
The series became popular outside of Switzerland due to its lack of a real spoken language – nearly all dialogue is in an invented “penguin language” made up of honking, muttering and other sounds including the popular catchphrase “Noot noot!”.
All the characters in the original four season run were performed by Italian voice actor Carlo Bonomi, using a language of sounds he had already developed.
The Pingu series will be co-developed by Sarah Cox and Alan Thorpe for Aardman, and Sidney Clifton, Rob David and Melanie Shannon for Mattel Television Studios.
The news comes as Aardman will release their second feature-length “Wallace and Gromit” film titled “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” which comes to Netflix at Christmas in the UK and in the U.S. early in the new year.
Source: THR
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