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Picolo Pictures has unveiled exclusive first-look images for their upcoming feature “On the Run” (“La petite cavale”), currently presented at Annecy’s MIFA Pitches.

The film will see a young male blue penguin, Cookie, who dreams of becoming a dad. Cookie can’t lay an egg, but a volcanic eruption turns his New Zealand refuge upside down and sets a curious soft echidna’s egg in his path. What if this was the little one he had been waiting for?

“At the heart of the film is our wish to tell the story of a family bond,” its director Julien Bisaro tells Variety. Bisaro co-writes with Claire Paoletti.

“That’s one of the major issues for our two characters, who belong to completely different species: Making it work! These kinds of unexpected adoptions can be observed in real life too: a cat raises chicks, a leopard raises a baby baboon and so on.

Julien Bisaro and Claire Paoletti, the French director-writer team behind award-winning short Shooom’s Odyssey (2020) are setting their feature debut. The duo pitched the animated feature La Petite Cavale (On The Run) to co-production partners, as well as producers and broadcasters, at an industry session at this year’s Annecy animation festival on Wednesday. Bisaro and Paoletti screened a two-minute pilot for the project, which France’s Picolo Pictures are producing.

The kids-friendly feature focuses on Cookie, a male penguin who cannot lay an egg. When a volcanic eruption disrupts his New Zealand refuge and rolls an echidna egg in his path, Cookie takes it as a sign that this is the opportunity for fatherhood he has been longing for, and decides to raise the echidna chick as his own.

The bird theme and focus on parenthood recall Bisaro and Paoletti’s Shooom’s Odyssey, which told the story of little owl...