When the last 4x4 leaves the African safari park, the mud-caked hippos shrug off their torpor and begin their second shift. Patricia Hidalgo’s wordless 2-minute vignettes follow specialised cousins, each defined by a single obsession: Astro constructs tin-can rockets to reach the Moon, Ballerina pirouettes across the empty plaza, Stunt catapults himself over the lake in a home-made cannon, and Party simply will not let the beat drop. The humour is pure slapstick, delivered in kinetic 3-D CGI that lets 200-ton bodies ricochet like rubber balls.
Episodes hinge on mysterious drops from the sky, a narrative cheat that keeps the enclosure stocked with disco boomboxes, treasure islands, baby aliens and wailing infants. Handy, the makeshift engineer, welds junk into catapults while the others squabble over the payoff. Water drains, safes fall, rockets misfire, yet by sunrise every mess is smoothed back into the landscape before the rangers return.
Turner EMEA farmed the production out to a four-nation consortium, Ferrero, Spider Eye and Cyber Group Studios, yielding 70 shorts across two seasons for Boomerang and Cartoonito. The series premiered 3 November 2016 and wrapped 26 December 2018, clocking a cumulative 140 minutes of sugar-rush chaos designed for channel-surfing attention spans. No dialogue means global dubbing is redundant; the score by Natalie Holt and Tom Angell supplies the pratfall punctuation.
Production Details
Boomerang / 2 Seasons / 70 Episodes / 2016
Created by: Patricia Hidalgo
Producer(s): Erica Darby Patricia Hidalgo Richelle Wilder
Main Cast
