Coproduction as a form of financing animation

In Europe, especially in animation, coproduction is a necessary evil. In most cases you simply cannot finance your animated project with money from just one territory, but you have to enlist the help of one or more coproducers. Of course there are exceptions, where smaller projects or better funded companies (often in France, the largest animation market in Europe) can make do without coproducers, but these are not the norm.

So what a producer has to do, is to shop around at markets (Berlin, Cannes, the MIFA at Annecy) or financing events (BUFF financing forum in Malmö or Cartoon Movie, the premiere financing platform for animated features in Europe), in hopes of finding coproduction partners.

The plight of the producer

Like German film lawyer Patrick Jacobshagen says in his book “Filmbusiness”, coproduction is often like a union between hardship and misery. All coproduction partners are producers and none have much money to invest in the project themselves. However coproducing helps the project in providing access to multiple streams of film support schemes, as each coproduction partner applies for funding at his or her film fund. Some money, like the EU’s MEDIA scheme or the NFTF – Nordic Film and TV Fund, can only be accessed if you have multiple countries on board either as coproducers or at least through sold rights (like the NFTF).

The European coproduction system for animation has been alive and working for a long time, and has been criticised for nearly as long. Some major downsides for going into coproduction are:

• you need to invest time and money into finding a good partner
• you need to make compromises with the contents of the project
• you need to give away interesting parts of the work split that you might have wanted to do at your studio
• you need to implement an approval process, and all important decisions have to be made “by committee”
• it “costs” about 25-33% of the budget, money that is never seen on the screen

The cost of coproducing

The last figure is only an estimation, but has been repeated by many different professionals in the last few years, so I assume it to be quite representative. This money that is spent “on coproducing” goes into different kinds of costs, for example:

• costs for flights and accommodation for various producer and creative meetings
• communications costs (phone, fax, courier services)
• multiple overheads of each participating production company
• delays from adjusting to each other’s workflow (on a feature I worked on as PM we had 4 coproducers and 4 different interpretations of the word “shot”)
• language barriers (most people do not speak a common language as a mother tongue and communicating complex matters can be difficult)
• delays due to the approval process
• work that has to be redone due to communication errors

As a thought experiment: A producer would raise 40% of the budget, then enter into a coproduction to gather 27-35% extra financing, with 25-33% being spent “on coproducing”. Of course this isn’t how it is budgeted, but a producer should account for the extra costs early on during budgeting. As a producer, you have to balance these new costs with the possibility of raising the budget required to produce your project.

These downsides to coproducing are a big incentive for producers to try and find alternative ways to finance their projects. At the moment coproduction remains the “beaten path” for European animation financing, but producers would do well in cultivating relationships with investors and financing sources from outside the usual film fund – TV pre-sale – distribution pre-sale triangle.

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