ToonyWorld!

ToonyWorld! is a 2012 French-Belgium-Luxembourg computer animated adventure comedy film produced by BlueSpark Pictures and directed by Benjamin Lauwick.

In 2012, the film had a low-key release, being direct-to-video in most territories. Critical reception was overwhelmingly negative, with most criticism towards the animation, and has appeared on some lists of the worst french animated movies of all time.

Plot
Still in Development

Cast
Still in Development

Production
Benjamin Lauwick and a BlueSpark Pictures and Oniria Productions employee named Joshua Wexler created the concept in 1999. A €25 million joint investment into the project was made by BlueSpark and the Korean investment company Natural Image. The producers expected that foreign pre-sales and loans against the sales would provide the remaining portion of the budget. The estimated remainder was €50 million.

The film was created and produced by the digital effects shop at BlueSpark, located in Santa Monica, California in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In late 2002/early 2003, Lauwick reported that hard drives containing unfinished assets from the film had been stolen in what he called an act of "industrial espionage". The film was supposed to be computer-animated, with an exaggerated use of "squash and stretch" to resemble the Looney Tunes shorts, but after production resumed in 2004,  Lauwick changed it to a style more centered in motion capture, with the result being that "he and animators were speaking two different languages".

Lionsgate established a distribution deal and the financing company Cube Creative represented investors who gave €20 million in funding to BlueSpark in 2005 due to the Lionsgate deal, the celebrity voice actors, and the product tie-ins. A release date in 2005 was later announced, but missed. Another distribution deal was struck in 2007, but again, nothing came of it. Lionsgate had a negative reaction to the delays. The investors had grown impatient due to the film production company defaulting on its secured promissory note and the release dates that were not met. Finally, in 2011, the film was auctioned for €3.5 million. Cube Creative investors had ultimately invoked a clause in their contract that allowed the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, which had insured ToonyWorld!, to complete and release the film as inexpensively and quickly as possible.

Sales
The insurance company received the copyright to the film in 2012 and began releasing it and its associated merchandise. In June 2012, Toonyworld! received a limited release in the United Kingdom and France, grossing approximately $20,000 of ticket sales on its opening weekend. It was released on DVD in Europe that October.

Critical response
At the time Toonyworld! was announced, the film was denounced for taking product placement to the extreme, and doing it in a film targeted at children. The AV Club stated that "...the grotesque ugliness of the animation alone would be a deal-breaker even if the film weren’t also glaringly inappropriate in its sexuality, nightmare-inducing in its animation, and filled with Nazi overtones and iconography even more egregiously unfit for children than the script’s wall-to-wall gauntlet of crude double entendres and weird intimations of interspecies sex."

Merchandising
Coming Soon

Gallery
Still in Development

Credits
Coming Soon