Animating Little Viewers’ Big Emotions with OAK9 Entertainment

Ahead of the MIPCOM market, we caught up with OAK9 Entertainment President Mindaugas Jokubaitis to find out about the innovative Lithuanian animation company’s latest projects.

Animation Magazine: Can you tell us a bit the history of your animation company?

Mindaugas Jokubaitis: We are an innovative new media company focused on creating, nurturing and building global franchises that delight and engage. We do that by putting storytelling at the heart of everything we do, across development, production, distribution, marketing and merchandising — and then creatively developing the best ways to tell those stories across platforms. We’re developing everything from traditional episodic animation, short-form, social, music, features, LBE [location-based entertainment] and all forms of publishing, as well as unlocking Web 3.0, AI and new gaming platforms to develop new routes to market and commerce. Our new show Stomp! Stomp! Rhinos! gives us the opportunity to embrace all these new modalities in a kid-appropriate way for the long term.

How would you describe your animation specialties? 

As producers and IP [intellectual property] developers of content for kids, we hold a huge responsibility of influence on young audiences, to engage them through content that encourages not only entertainment but development as well. At the same time, we try not to forget the parents’ audience. The content should be useful for both, encourage co-viewing practices.

We’re creating not only animated TV preschool series but also putting our focus on the wider audience with films, IPs, various series and features. We recently finished a new CG-animated short titled Just Imagine by Karolis Kveselis. We’re very excited that this short began its journey in festivals around the world.

Currently we’re adding a lot of focus and resources on our new project for preschoolers, which is an animated TV series called Stomp! Stomp! Rhinos! We’re investing a lot of effort to make high-quality animation and that includes lots of research and collection of live feedback. For example, we recently decided to utilize a specialist software called Wantent, which features an AI-powered audience measurement tool. It tracks the facial expressions of audiences as they watch content and offers feedback based on facial tracking of their emotional responses such as happiness, sadness, fear, engagement, etc. Recently, we received feedback from 60 families (parents and children) who watched several episodes of our new series.

I would say that our expertise is listening to and understanding our target audience. Not only do we use audience measurement tools, we speak directly to parents and kids about what they want from stories and employ developmental experts to help us validate that. For example, for Stomp! Stomp! Rhinos! we know that Gen A kids (and soon Gen B kids) and their parents want stories that are far more diverse and open-minded about the world around them, particularly as it relates to emotional well-being. Part of our specialty is turning these critical insights into great stories and characters that connect.

What would you say sets your company apart from other animation studios around the world?

I would say that our studio is best represented by the word “resilience.” Being a smaller studio may feel like a disadvantage against some of the bigger global players, but we make up for it with speed, passion, creativity and attention to detail. As a studio, we set out to prove that franchises can come from anywhere, regardless of size, because at the end of the day, great stories win wherever they are told — and we are great storytellers! Lithuania has a history of technological innovation and doing things differently, and that’s why we’re proud of what we’re building with Stomp! Stomp! Rhinos!

The season of the show should be ready for the first quarter of 2025. Kids will learn useful skills about managing their anxiety, while enjoying the fun and entertaining adventures of the show. At first glance, this topic might look too difficult for kids. But anxiety is a part of our lives; it is something we’re encountering from an early age and living with it our whole life. It’s important for us to highlight this topic and encourage speaking about it with kids and understand how they experience anxiety. For this purpose, we’re actively working with child psychologist Rugilė Kazlauskienė and creative director Vytautas Tautkevičius, who continue sharing great psychological and creative insights with our team.

Can you tell us about any of your other projects?

We have a few TV series and a feature film in our pipeline. One that we can talk more [about] is a new animated show titled Bloxy, Box and Ball, [created] along with Carousel from Serbia, which got MEDIA funding for co-development. This 2.5D-animated show (26 x 7′) targets preschoolers and brings the adventures of video game hero Bloxy, who steps out of the screen into the real world, in hopes of becoming a real child. His new friends are a playful ball, a wise box and a pet bottle! This show celebrates kids’ imaginations and games in the real world, outside the screen. It boldly reminds us all that our best childhood memories come from playing with a cardboard box, rather than watching one with a screen.

How was the first season of Stomp! Stomp! Rhinos! received and what are your future plans for the series?

We got some very positive feedback from the industry and, most important, from our focus audiences. As I mentioned before, we conducted some analytical research with the company Wantent (including AI technology). Following the results, we were inspired to start the second season as soon as possible, so it is almost completed. And also, we already started the third season, which now is in the works as well. We can share some of these great results from kids and parents: 73% of kids would love to watch the next episode and even 81% of parents would love to try to use the techniques we presented in the show through storytelling and entertainment.

That’s when we came up with the idea for our second season: Let’s talk about anxiety, which is one of the most common emotions and challenges we’re dealing with in our daily life. We even changed the angle of the show, including not only emotions but also including the state of anxiety. It is so exciting for us to see how it evolves with each episode. We don’t want to stigmatize the unpleasant emotions. We are trying to ask the important questions: How do you live with them? How do you recognize them? In this way, we’re continuing to tell the Rhinos’ family story, sharing the experiences of our best practices on how to deal with anxiety. And we’re hoping those practices will inspire many families across the world.
The main message that we want to send to the world is there are fun ways to overcome the challenges in our lives. All emotions and states are part of normal human life. We want children to learn to recognize their feelings and know the many ways they can manage their emotions.

What would you like the animation community around the world to know about you?

Our goal is to show that you can create something really special with a small company with a “startup” vibe in a small country. Here in Lithuania, we have a lot of great talent worth exploring and collaborating with. We want to lift this talent and show their great projects to world. We hope these projects will inspire the world audience as they are inspiring us right now.

For more information, visit oak9e.com.