Howie
Howie is a young hippo finding his way in his new city. He’s been adopted by Hilda and now he wants to share the happiness he’s found with all of his new friends! Howie’s only young, so he’s still finding his place in the world – and you’d better believe he’s excited about it! There’s new places to visit and challenges to overcome; his optimism is positively overflowing! Naturally, that can get a little messy. Not to worry! Hilda is never far away.
Howie loves inner city life! There’s always something interesting to see and do, especially for an excitable young hippo who’s keen to get stuck in! Howie and Hilda have plenty of good friends and neighbours in their lively, diverse neighbourhood. There’s the park, Hilda’s bookshop, alongside the Gelateria and the Grocery Store, the Library, and lots of spaces among the tall buildings where others have made gardens, cafes and playgrounds. Howie often likes to visit the park and listen to the band play his favourite songs!
This collection of Howie shorts consists of 20 x 1 minute, comedy episodes aimed at children aged 3-5. The series was developed and produced by Jon Rennie and animated in Moho at Cloth Cat. Howie was originally conceived of and created by the talented Michelle Robinson(The Goodnight Series) and the marvellously imaginative Fred Blunt (Captain Falsebeard). The scripts were crafted by the award winning writer/show creator Dave Ingham (Dave Spud, Shaun the Sheep). The music for Howie was composed and produced by Emmy award-winning composer Brollyman. The project was commissioned by S4C and supported by Creative Wales.
Cloth Cat’s Head of Animation Development, Tom Lucas provided the art direction for the series, bringing to life the vivid visual style of Howie and Hilda’s colourful world. The Animation Director, Dani Abram has over 15 years’ experience in the animation industry, working across games, films and TV for some of the world’s best loved studios. Dani brought her exceptional Moho expertise to the project, allowing Howie the hippo to come bounding onto our screens.
Howie is a visually dynamic show; his expressions and actions are intended to be entertainingly overexaggerated. Fred Blunt’s designs really leap off the page, which is the reason why we fell in love with Howie the hippo right from the start. The storyboards for Howie were created by Benedict Tomczyk-Bowen, who has worked on shows with most of the major animation studios and also developed his own project for Nickelodeon. Benedict is also the tutor of Cloth Cat Academy’s Storyboarding: A Professional Toolkit course and we were delighted to have him on board for Howie.
Howie is currently available to watch on the Cloth Cat YouTube Channel. To watch the full series in Welsh on S4C’s Cyw YouTube Channel, click here. We’re also very excited to announce that Cloth Cat Games are currently designing Howie mobile games for broadcasters and websites and hope to create a standalone PC and console game for parents to play alongside their children. We are also planning to produce a full series of 52 x 7min episodes, a selection of books, music albums, activity packs, merchandise and collectables to compliment the series! Here’s the very first episode, Brain Freeze.