Animation Magazine Cartoon Movie 2022

previous page

TOC

TV/Streaming

Tales of Two Russian Princesses Wizart Animation is unveiling two top-notch family features, The Snow Queen & The Princess and The Warrior Princess, this year.

T

his is shaping up to be a very busy year for Russia’s award-winning studio Wizart Animation. This month, the studio will be bringing two highly anticipated titles to the European Film Market in Berlin: The Warrior Princess and The Snow Queen & The Princess. Both films are slated to premiere in 2022 — the exciting new chapter in the The Snow Queen universe will arrive in theaters in May, while the multi-faceted epic offering The Warrior Princess is slated for the end of the year.

A Fifth Tentpole Last year, Wizart had a great run with its The Snow Queen spin-off Tales of Wonder Keepers, which was released worldwide as an iQIYI Original series. The 26 x 12 min. CG-animated series became the most popular children’s

title on iQIYI, China’s leading VOD service, and was also one of the streamer’s top 15 overall offerings. (The platform boasts over 500 million monthly active users, who consume 6 billion hours of content each month.)

“We have great plans for our new feature The Snow Queen & The Princess,” says Vladimir Nikolaev, Wizart’s founder & CEO and the film’s producer. “The movie will have a wide release in Russia/CIS beginning on May 26. We have major licensing deals on their way to support the new release such as stationery, dolls and books.

We’re also planning strong international releases in France, South Korea and Turkey around that time. We are also looking forward to announcing the following new releases in other territories with our loyal and stable partners from the previous features. Previous install-

ments were sold to more than 150 countries.”

Nikolaev points out that the property’s audience has grown with each movie in the series. “The production quality bar has also been raised by our studio,” he notes. “The Snow Queen audience has been growing since the release of the first Snow Queen movie and the production quality bar of our studio, too.

Our fifth movie in the franchise will have a completely new look, and the story will center on a completely new character. Probably, this time, we are going farther from the original fairy tale than ever before.»

In the new movie, the Snow Queen will be back, but the focus of the story is her carefree and misbehaving daughter, Ila. “Kai, Gerda and Ila will embark on a new journey to save the entire world from global freezing,” says Nikolaev. “Needless to say,

www.animationmagazine.net 20

TOC

march 22

previous page