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A Grumpy Teacher with a Big Heart! Riki Group’s charming show Beardy Bodo helps teach children the joys of reading and world travel.
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arents searching for new ways to improve their kids’ reading skills need to look no further than Beardy Bodo, the charming new animated show from the creative team at Riki Group. The lead character, who is a grouchy man with an enormous beard, doesn’t know how to read very well himself, but he invites kids to solve simple puzzles and fun reading activities to improve their skills. As the show’s tagline promises, Beardy Bodo “knows nothing, but he’ll teach anything and everything!” The origin of the show, according to director Vladimir Sakhnovskiy, goes back to the summer of 2014. He recalls, “I was visiting my sister and her husband in Germany and we wanted to create an educational series for children on YouTube. So, I came up with several concepts. The idea with the grumpy teacher seemed to be the most interesting. My sister genuinely laughed at my animatic and gave the character the German name ‘Bodo’ and then added the adjective ‘Beardy.’ That’s how our character was born!” Riki Group’s head of development Maria Tereshchenko, who is also the show’s creative producer, says about five years ago the development department at the studio was looking for strong preschool and educational shows. “That’s how Bodo was introduced to us,” she recalls. “At first, it was a character and a concept outlined in general terms. Then, through the process of development the character’s appearance was refined and, of course, a lot of effort was invested in creating the scripts for the show, which was a real challenge. We wanted to make short episodes that would combine educational content with absurdity (which is not easy), and at the same time fully embody the vivid character that Vladimir had created.”
‘The fact that Bodo Travel premiered in Russia in 2020 when many borders were closed is especially ironic. The series offered the opportunity to travel from home, reminisce about pleasant moments from journeys, and to make plans for what you would like to see in person when traveling becomes possible again.’ — Producer Desislava Medkova
Young Inspiration Tereshchenko says her own son served as a source of inspiration for the show. “When he was younger, he regularly and confidently advocated various ridiculous ideas, and never got upset when he found out he was wrong! He easily and charmingly changed his mind promoting something else with the same fervor. Our Beardy Bodo Travel season was inspired by our own traveling experiences. Our whole team is really enthusiastic about traveling. So, a lot of the stories, conflicts and places featured on the show are based on our personal experiences — perhaps a little bit reworked in creative ways” Sakhnovoskiy adds, “Back then, you could make an educational animated series inexpensively from scratch, and it could get tens of millions of views. It seemed like a good business model. I came up with the idea of a series that I could do on my own, with no third-party investments needed. And then the Bodo project won the contest launched by Riki Group, so I didn’t have to do it from scratch and all by myself!” In the first season, Beardy Bodo A-B-C, the creative team opted for a certain simplicity. “We didn’t want anything superfluous either on the screen or in the characters’ movements,” says Tereshchenko. “An ABC book usually only
has a picture of a subject and a caption. This explains the white backgrounds and the very conventional, often abstract depiction of the environment, the objects that do not fall into the focus of our narrative. At the same time, we wanted to achieve a balance between the artistry of modern books for children and the intelligibility of the images, which is clearly necessary for such an educational project.” As the show’s producer Desislava Medkova points out, Beardy Bodo features limited animation based on the expressive poses of the characters, especially the main one. “I would like to note that this style of animation has a side effect!” she says. “It gives incredible pleasure to those who are involved in the marketing of the project, including myself, as it is an inexhaustible source of various promotional materials. Thanks to the chosen style of animation, freeze frames are incredibly impressive, and there is a huge number of excellent expressive poses of characters available for the creation of banners, posters (and we make a new banner for each new episode), for the development of the brand book and licensed products. The lead director and the lead animator supervise the creation of the layouts very carefully to make sure that Bodo’s poses are as eye-catching as possible!”
www.animationmagazine.net 28
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november 21
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