Kids’ Toon Team Animates New Yorker Comics

Wow. Now even one-panel comics come alive through the digital web and mobile!

While snooping around syndication services for Shaping Youth, we stumbled on these short, snappy bursts of content from RingTales who just launched a worldwide premiere of animated cartoons exclusively licensed from the New Yorker.

Cartoons and humor are a youth media fave, so we’ve been looking into how to use them in our counter-marketing and viral efforts. Cartoons engage and inform with lightening speed, so we’re hoping to snag a few seconds of parents’ time and toss in some media literacy with a teehee.

These guys have some heavy hitters on their team. Founders Jim Cox and Michael Fry are long-time writer/producers of feature animation, with films like Over the Hedge, Ferngully, Beauty and the Beast, Rescuers Down Under, and Oliver & Company to their credit.

RingTales uses an advertising revenue-sharing model, so Shaping Youth would have to prescreen how benign the postroll tie-in would be if we wanted to air cartoon content topical to our blog, for example. (funny one with hedgehogs smoking themselves to death which would’ve been perfect for our Pink Dreams tobacco piece; ok you had to be there)

Anyway, there are said to be 70 million print comic viewers in the U.S. alone, so if we could deliver a little snippet of irony, or customize our core content to convey a light-hearted touch, we’d be sitting pretty to draw people into the site once we officially launch and get our funding solid.

Cool concept for those who only have time for a tidbit rather than digest a full media meal. As Media Snackers in the U.K. might agree, this once again proves that ‘good things come in small packages.’ Speaking of which:

Don’t miss their vodcasts and podcasts about youth media, and follow their digest about the 5th World Summit on Media and Children held in South Africa later this month. From globalization to youth media used for peace and democracy, this summit looks impressive. Stay tuned!