Sunny Bunnies hop deeper into China
Details
Joseph O'Halloran
| 07 March 2019

London-based premium animation and family entertainment specialist and content distribution company Media IM has closed a string of deals in China for its hit pre-school animation Sunny Bunnies.

Produced by Digital Light Studio, the Sunny Bunnies are five beaming balls that can appear anywhere there is a source of light, from sunshine to moonlight. In each episode, the creatures bring their fun and games to a different location — a circus, a sports stadium, a park — embarking on adventures. And at the end of every episode, the fun continues with a collection of bloopers.

The studio has now started the production of Season 4 of the series which is now on air in more than 160 territories.

China is the latest of these to take a shine to the animation and the country’s second-largest OTT player, Alibaba’s video giant Youku, which has licensed two seasons of the animation, Under the deal, which starts this month, Youku has taken the VOD rights for PCs, tablets, mobile phones, OTT and set-top boxes.

Another VOD deal with Mango TV will see season one of Sunny Bunnies air on the Hunan TV-owned SVOD platform, as well as on its PC, mobile and IPTV propositions. Mango TV, which is also relicensing season two the show, has held the Chinese AVOD rights for seasons two and three since January 2018. In less than a year, Sunny Bunnies has generated more than 1.3 billion views across Mango TV’s PC, mobile, OTT and IPTV platforms.

The third major deal with a Chinese multinational, the world’s second-largest smartphone-maker, Huawei, has taken the VOD rights for seasons one and two of Sunny Bunnies, to be used on its handsets in Italy and Spain.

Commenting on the deals in China, Media IM co-founder Irina Nazarenko said: “The Sunny Bunnies’ super-power is to make everybody, everywhere fall in love with them. The fact that the Bunnies generated over a billion views for Mango TV in less than a year — an impressive figure even by Chinese standards — reconfirms that this is a once-in-a-generation show with truly global appeal. As everybody in our industry knows, China is a tough market to crack.”