We caught up with Tine Klint, Founder and CEO of Danish sales and distribution outfit LevelK, who attended this year’s Cartoon Movie (8-10 March) remotely. During our chat, we touched upon the firm’s editorial policy, the type of animated content it seeks, working practices and audience trends.

Cineuropa: You’ve attended the event remotely this year. What were your activities and what type of animated content were you looking for? Could you talk about LevelK’s editorial policy?
Tine Klint: Unfortunately, I had to attend Cartoon Movie online this year, but I still got a good overview of the strong European animated projects in development and production. LevelK is looking for entertaining animation features reaching the target group 6-12+. We handle one or two animated features a year for world sales and aggregation. Over the last few years, Checkered Ninja 1 [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] (2018) and Checkered Ninja 2 [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] (2021) stood out for us because we saw a change in the acceptance of humour and both films did not only sell internationally, but they also did well commercially. Something has changed in approach and acceptance since our 2011 animated feature Ronal the Barbarian [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], where we had to cover up the naked butt on the film's poster, so that we could have the front page of a trade publication during the American Film Market. Generally speaking, animation productions based on books have done well for us as well, and here I can highlight the Czech animated film The Oddsockeaters [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Galina Miklínová as well as The Incredible Story of the Giant Pear [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Amalie Næsby Fick, Jørgen Lerdam, Philip Einstein Lipski. Our latest acquisition is the Dutch stop-motion flick Oink [+lee también:
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entrevista: Mascha Halberstad
ficha de la película], which opened the Generation Kplus programme of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

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What kind of audience shifts did you notice in terms of consuming animated content? And what type of genres and formats do you believe are on the rise within the European animation scene?
Generally speaking, the audience is consuming a lot of animated content, and the world is now more open than ever to different techniques, styles and formats. I believe we will see a growth for European animation where a variety of genres and formats will find their audience on different platforms – be it cinema, TV screens or mobiles. It’s difficult to highlight specific titles or genres because there are so many good ones. If you just turn on the TV and run through the catalogues, I can see there is a great variety of appealing content available. And I feel the same when producers are reaching out to us as well...

How did the outbreak affect your working practices? Are some of these practices set to remain in place even in the post-pandemic phase?
We changed the way we work across all areas, including sales, aggregation, traffic, PR & Marketing and so on... We will continue to develop new digital tools and our way of working. We will not go back!