Kiri and Lou is a Kiwi-made kids show which aims to help children tackle their emotions. Photo / Supplied
Kiri and Lou is a Kiwi-made kids show which aims to help children tackle their emotions. Photo / Supplied
You might know Harry Sinclair and Don McGlashan from 80s musical comedy duo The Front Lawn.
A whole new generation around the globe is getting to know them as the brains behind children's show Kiri and Lou.
Pitched at kids aged 3-7, the stop-motion animation is about the adventures of a dinosaur called Kiri and a purple creature named Lou in prehistoric Aotearoa - complete with catchy songs.
Available on TVNZ's Heihei and OnDemand platforms since last year, the show has been picked up by the BBC and selected for the New York International Children's Film Festival.
Beyond that, the five-minute episodes are also screening - or set to - across parts of Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East.
If you've not got kids - or you've not been paying attention - Sinclair writes and directs the show and they collaborate on the songs. McGlashan also writes the scores for the episodes.
"I wanted to do something meditative, gentle and kind and not so in-your-face as a lot of stuff on TV," Sinclair tells TimeOut.
Harry Sinclair and Don McGlashan teamed up to make Kiri and Lou. Photo / Supplied
"I started thinking about a space it could take place in, I thought about the New Zealand bush and how the sort of stillness and beauty of it."
The characters learn life lessons from manners to mindfulness. In one episode, Lou finds himself stuck on a lily pad in the middle of a lake and uses his calm, inner voice to make it safely back to shore.
"We carry those anxieties with us into adulthood and it's lovely to be working on something that speaks to their condition," McGlashan says.
"Parenting is such hard work and so it's such a lonely business ... finding an ally is a great thing."
The duo enlisted an ally of their own to voice one of the characters.
"The pilot sat around for a while before we could get the funding to do the rest of it and Jemaine Clement agreed to do one of the voices," McGlashan says.
Clement was in Canada working on Steven Spielberg's The Big Friendly Giant while McGlashan was staying in an apartment in Vancouver. Sinclair was in Los Angeles so flew north to meet them.
"We all converged in a little apartment and we put the mattresses up against the doors and windows. We recorded Jemaine's voice into a microphone and a laptop," McGlashan says.
With Clement on board as Lou and Olivia Tennet as Kiri, the duo secured funding and the animation talents of Kiwi Antony Elworthy, who was the lead animator on Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs.
Elworthy returned to New Zealand with his family and the stop-motion animation studio Stretchy was set up in Christchurch. At one point, two animators from the Wallace and Gromit team were working on the show.
"At different times there's been this whole kind of workshop of really cool animators from different parts of the world, plus some Kiwis," McGlashan says.
"It's a very happy little gang," says Sinclair. "We got to the studio in Christchurch and these animators are working silently, moving tiny bits of clay, one frame and then one frame and then one frame.
"I don't really know how they do it," Sinclair admits.
Despite the international success, the pair promise the show will stay true to its roots.
"I think what is appealing to people is the New Zealand-ness of it," Sinclair says.
The voices aren't being re-dubbed in English-speaking territories either, McGlashan says.
"In Canada it's playing with Kiwi voices and in England it's going out that way too. So that's a triumph. That's either because of the intrinsic qualities of the show or because the Kiwi accent is something that people now know in the world."
