Michael Levine’s Pileated Pictures delivered a huge volume of animation for Hasbro’s new board game – Trivial Pursuit Dvd For Kids. It released this summer, and the game, which is aimed at kids 8 and up, is currently going for $29.99 over at Amazon.com.

I got my hands on a copy, and briefly played around with the DVD. It’s set up like a TV show – with episodes, and the game is sold as ‘Season 1.’ I recorded some footage from the game and cut together a short assembly.

Post Magazine recently posted an article by Ann Fisher titled ‘Animation For TV Shows,’ which starts off with an update on ‘Caillou,’ the animated program for children 2 to 6 that has spawned several DVD releases. ‘Caillou,’ is based on a series of books by Christine L’Heureux and illustrator Helene Desputeaux, and it has been airing in Canada on Teletoon and on PBS in the US. For the upcoming Fall season, the show’s producers have turned to Flash to animate the episodes.

Porting over to Flash has allowed Ottawa-based Cookie Jar Entertainment to bring the show’s animation production back to Canada, while improving their work flow and maintaining ‘Caillou’s hand-drawn look. The animation, produced by Pip Animation, is completed in Flash, but the animators still draw poses by hand and then import their work into the software.

Below are a few highlights of Fisher’s piece, but you can read then entire article at the Post Magazine website.

“…The idea is to make it, obviously, less expensive to produce, to keep it all in Canada where we can access funding for it, keep control of it, to have the show look the same as the previous series, ” (Cookie Jar Entertainment executive producer Lesley Taylor.)

“Flash can manipulate existing drawings,” says Taylor. “It can make them smaller, bigger… it could flip them. It used to be we’d get a video of Digi Beta of the show that would or would not arrive, depending on shipping. And now we go to Web site links and we just look at a whole film for mix approval. It’s not television size, it’s 6-inches across, but there’s no more distance. There’s still time differences but distance is gone. And we’re getting more and more digital in how we work with FTP sites and artwork,” she says. “We still want the handdrawn component of it, but there’s less of that and I’m not paying customs anymore. I love that I’m not paying shipping.”

‘Faireez,’ new Flash-animated series is gearing up to launch onto multiple international networks. The series, which is aimed at kids 5-7, is a co-production by Australia’s Moody Street Kids and Canada’s Funbag Animation. The show welcomes us “to the animated series Faireez, where four intrepid trainees – Gabby, Polly, Tucker and Tim – do their best to foil the plans of the bad-tempered, feckless and wet-blanket-baddie: Jumpalina.” You can see a few seconds of animation on the Funbag Animation website, but be prepared for the large download – 40mb. The show will initially air on the UK’s GMTV, Australia’s Network Ten and Nickelodeon Australia, and the B Wooding Media site has an October 2005 date for US market availability.

Breakthrough Animation, one of the fine companies behind the international Flash-animation hit ‘Atomic Betty,’ is rolling out a fresh new show. ‘Captain Flamingo,’ a 30-episode co-production with Heroic Film Company, Atomic Cartoons and PASI Animation, will be rolling out on Canada’s YTV in January 2006. The show centers on Milo Powell, a little boy with a terrycloth cape who fights for justice along with his next door neighbor Lizbeth. The property bowed at NATPE 2005, and expect a worldwide rollout to commence soon.

If a dozen Flash-animated shows are green-lit tomorrow morning, it’s undoubtedly a good thing for the Flash world at large. But it wouldn’t mean a damn thing if those shows were summarily canceled 6 weeks later, right? So put your hands together for the latest ratings success – ‘Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi,’ the new King (or should I say ‘Queen’) of the Kids 2-11 ratings segment (source: Animation Insider).

‘Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi,’ the plucky, eye-candy-filled, relationship-driven (sorry guys, no fights or power-ups in this show) has delivered the goods for Cartoon Network, the undisputed #1 supporter of Flash animation on US television. With the strongest ratings ever for an original premiere in the Kids 2-11 segment, ‘Puffy’ seems well poised for a lengthy run. Girls, not surprisingly, have taken to the show in droves, increasing CN’s female eyeball count by over 60% during that time slot.

As far as the show itself, the producers have chosen the perfect animation platform for the show’s look and feel (it’s animated by Renegade Animation). The simple, iconic designs and the Hanna Barbera-esque appeal make this is an ideal show for Flash, and I look forward to several more seasons of this beautiful show.