Awareness: Stemming the tide
Splash and Bubbles comes in the wake of the huge success of The Octonauts, the most watched cartoon by pre-school children in Britain, Ireland and Australia. PHOTO: FILE
Coral reefs may be dying at an alarming rate and pollution, coupled with overfishing, might be depleting the oceans but fear not! Help is at hand, in the form of a new wave of cartoon superheroes determined to save the Earth’s water supply.
While Finding Nemo and its sequel Finding Dory have been blamed for a spike in tropical fish poaching, Muppets creator, the Jim Henson Company has said that their new animated children’s series Splash and Bubbles will mobilise a new generation to save the underwater world.
According to AFP, the big-budget, 40-episode series aims to turn the tides to save the planet. Lisa Henson, daughter of Jim Henson, said the series comes at a vital time. While four to seven-year-olds may not be able to do much now to tackle the millions of tonnes of plastic waste that created the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, she claimed it is “their generation who will be left to solve such problems.”
Splash and Bubbles comes in the wake of the huge success of The Octonauts, the most watched cartoon by pre-school children in Britain, Ireland and Australia. The ‘edutainment’ show has a team of animated animals rescuing sea creatures from their base in the Octopod. With catchphrase slogans like “Explore! Rescue! Protect,” The Octonauts has been described as Star Trek meets French explorer Jacques Cousteau.
Film-makers are now working with the Monaco oceanographic museum to create another series about child heroes fighting for marine conservation. Pirates of the Abyss will feature four friends who go off on aquatic adventures in an old submarine to right the wrongs of pollution and overexploitation of the oceans.
Producer Aymeric Castaing said the series, aimed at slightly older kids, would tap into their anger at what is happening to the environment. “The world we live in will soon be in the hands of these kids. It is they who will have to save the oceans,” he stated.
According to Castaing, the characters begin their quest after chancing upon on a laboratory left behind by “some of the greatest brains of the past,” including Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, Gustave Eiffel and Prince Albert I of Monaco, an early marine researcher. “These geniuses are in a way helping the children save the future,” added Castaing.
For Henson, Splash and Bubbles is also about teaching children good values in a fun way. “You would not believe how diverse the ocean floor is … There are seahorse single dads with 499 children,” she joked. “And it’s male seahorses that give birth.”
Henson added that although the show took its mission to educate seriously, with it is not preachy. “We are opening up the weird and wonderful world of marine science and conservation through fun adventures and music. And we are showing the ocean’s amazing diversity,” she claimed.
Each 11-minute episode will be cut with a humorous documentary segment called Get Your Feet Wet, wherein children will find out marine facts. Henson’s distributor Richard Goldsmith said the show’s purpose was to empower viewers. “One of lead characters, Splash’s favourite sayings is, ‘There is only one way to get over the fear of the unknown and that is to go there and find out about it’,” he revealed.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 19th, 2016.
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