01/04/2025 - At the CEE Animation conference Go! 2025, we spoke to participants from several countries who shared their thoughts on what needs to be kept in mind when creating such a fund

Iván Agenjo, of Peekaboo Animation, during the conference (© Matjaž Rušt)

Hosted in the European Capital of Culture, Gorizia-Nova Gorica (Italy/Slovenia), in mid-March, CEE Animation’s Go! 2025 conference homed in on the planned creation of a brand-new animation co-development fund, with a working group at the conference dedicated to exploring the possibilities of such a fund. The problem? As outlined by CEE Animation’s Matija Šturm, there exist models for co-development in Europe, but at the moment, there is nothing unique for animation.

To explore the opportunities for such a project, Cineuropa dove into discussions from the working group and also spoke further with several participants to learn more about their thoughts on the animation co-development film fund. What are the most pressing questions? What needs to be taken into account? And what would be most beneficial for each national context?

As loosely agreed upon by the participants, several baseline facts emerged that need to be taken into account, including that animation is very development-heavy. Maurfilm’s Martin Vandas, the Czech producer of the international co-production Tales from the Magic Garden [+see also:
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In the working group, Dita Rietuma, director of the National Film Centre of Latvia, spoke about how the focus is often on strategy over the amount of funding in countries where there are limited financial resources. An example she gave was that of the Oscar-winning Flow [+see also:
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film profile], which required a significant effort on the part of the film’s producers to ensure that Latvia remained as majority producer. A co-development fund would thus provide a chance to reduce the burden of this difficult but necessary strategising, with much of the heavy lifting occurring in an animated work’s development phase.

Another shared goal of the co-development fund would also be to stimulate collaboration between CEE countries, although the actual type of collaboration remains to be seen. From her experience producing Living Large [+see also:
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In a conversation with Edith Sepp, head of the Estonian Film Institute, she presented several questions about the scope of the fund but, like many others, leaned towards the fund as a way to support feature-length projects: “What the [animation] industry is in need of is to have an opportunity to develop feature-length films. I wouldn’t say it is only for children; I think it should also be for documentary makers who want to do something in animation, for example. We should be really flexible and open to what we are looking for.”

Foregrounding the long, acclaimed history of shorts animation in Estonia, she noted that co-production is not the first thing that comes to mind in the national setting, whereas for feature films and documentaries, they’re co-produced if they want to “hit the international market”. As such, Sepp says Estonia is “embracing [collaboration] with open arms”, despite not being so experienced in the animation market with co-produced or co-developed works. She also emphasised that the co-development fund is “one of the initiatives brought to the table by the producers. This is why I want to go along with it. I’m really happy to point out that this was something that came from the industry to the institute,” rather than the other way around.

Šturm also called attention to one of the crucial objectives of the project: developing a business model such that the sustainability of the fund could be ensured into the future. Iván Agenjo, CEO of and executive producer at Spain’s Peekaboo Animation – as well as the holder of leadership roles in several animation producers’ federations – raised important points about this that he elaborated on in a chat with Cineuropa: “I think a new co-development fund needs to have a clear definition. What’s the goal, what’s the purpose? It can be creative, or it can be market-driven. But the more creative input you have, the more complicated everything gets.”

He mentioned two diverging approaches that the co-development fund could adopt: one that is more supranational and involving many countries that rarely collaborate, and another that targets countries with “shared values and creative styles” with the goal of just two or three co-developing at the same time. From his experience, he noted that co-production can often involve many players with ease, but co-development is more difficult in this regard because a project is still in its infancy: “In development, everything is much more intertwined – [involving] many people at the same time enriches the project, but it also makes it slower and more difficult.”

He spotlighted a flip side: the strength that animation has in terms of both co-production and co-development, which he described as animation “not [being] linked to any cultural restraints”. For him, this means that collaboration comes even easier than it does for live action, making a co-development fund for animation a welcome idea – the specifics just need to be hammered out.