See Exodo Animation at Licensing Expo at Booth S254, and make appointments through the Licensing Expo match- making application, or contact Paco Navarro by email at navarro@exodoanimation.com.
By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
When Exodo Animation hits the floor at this year’s Licensing Expo, it will be with the goal of bringing their clients’ licenses to life.
Exodo may be a new name to many licensors in the US, but the company based in Guadalajara, Mexico is a highly successful 3D animation studio that has won or been nominated for hundreds of awards.
The company works on commercials, video game trailers, and short films for distributors like Disney, Nickelodeon, HBO Max and ESPN, among others.
I ran into Exodo after being captivated by the short film Anacronte it produced in partnership with Mr. Bug Studio of Argentina, and which airs in North America on HBO Max. It’s a surrealistic, somewhat apocalyptic but hopeful film that won an impressive 28 international film awards, and was nominated for nine more.
In the film, humanity faces the Anacronte and the Sorcerers of Evil who, fulfilling their destiny, and without a single drop of emotion, torpedo innocent people with the blow of their deadly, magical arrows. People’s lives are thrown out of joint leaving only death and grief to bring them together. It’s a brilliant short film, so I was happy to hear Exodo is going to Licensing Expo this year with the goal of expanding its work with international licensors.
“We have very specific goals,” said co-founder Paco Navarro. “The company is shifting, pivoting more towards animation in the video game sector.
“We’re not actually developing video games, but rather we are working on the teasers, trailers and the cinematic in partnership with the game developer,” he explains. “Over the next couple of years, what we’re looking for is to have at least 70% of our revenue coming from video games.”
At the current time, Exodo gets about one-third of its revenue from the video game sector, doing work like the ‘character reveals’ from the video game Paladins, or cinematic for the Kiwi Heroes mobile gaming project. Another third comes from advertising animation and other commercial projects, and the remaining one-third from producing short films like Anacronte.
For that reason, Exodo will also be introducing its own original IP for licensing, such as the mystery show ‘Fearnando’, in which kid sleuths Fernando, Frankie and Ghostavo battle their own fears to free their neighborhood from a terrible curse. They’ll also be bringing two new properties. Those are Joey’s Magic Book, a pre-school show about emotional intelligence and problem solving; and Zquad, a sci-fi show about unexpected alliances and friendship between a group of bounty hunters.
Navarro says that work will continue, but he sees video gaming as the major area of growth.
“We’re gamers who love games, so we’ve always wanted to be directly involved in gaming,” he says simply. “It also makes sense from a business perspective, because gaming studios have great ideas, challenging projects, and they often have very healthy budgets.
“Also, once they reach out to us to create their teasers, they usually have a very specific idea, and that gives you a lot of certainty on how things are going to be happening.”
Also, while Exodo has experienced success in their advertising and feature film productions, Navarro says there appears to be more of an untapped market in the video gaming space.
“There are a lot of video games going around, and it’s often easier to engage with video game companies than with entertainment companies because, you know, everyone wants to work with Netflix, and Amazon, and Disney.
“As a smaller company in Mexico that’s not among the usual suspects they work with, video game companies can be a good fit, because they are very much looking for the right partner for the right project.”
One thing that has propelled Exodo’s business forward since its founding 16 years ago is what Navarro calls the “Mexico Advantage.” On the one hand, the cost of animation is lower in Mexico than in the US or Canada, but Mexico is also in the same hemisphere and similar time zones as the entertainment or gaming companies in LA, New York, Toronto and Vancouver.
“Nearshoring is the hot word right now in Mexico for all kinds of industries,” Navarro said.
“We are only one hour difference from LA or New York, so there is not only the geographic advantage but a time zone advantage.
“It’s great, because we had some clients in from Los Angeles recently. They took a flight on Thursday afternoon, spent Friday working with our artists, and by Saturday they were back home having lunch with their families! Try that from India or Malaysia!”
But Navarro says animation studios in Mexico have other, less tangible advantages that are nevertheless more important than geography.
“People in Mexico have grown up with TV series, cartoons and movies from the US, so we are accustomed to and understand the humor, the drama, the rhythm, the jokes, and that is something that’s really hard to get in other cultures,” Navarro explains. “In fact, we have clients from places like China and South Korea who ask us to essentially ‘westernize’ their properties so they can sell them in the US, because it’s so much less expensive to work with us.
“So, we transform their properties, and then take them into the United States, because we understand the culture.”
While Exodo is particularly looking for partners in the video gaming space, they are also keen to work with a variety of companies on other projects as well. In fact, the company got its start by working with one of Mexico’s top football teams before there even was a company!
“They wanted to make some small, cartoonish versions of each of their players, so they asked us if we could do it, and even though we didn’t have a company at the time, we said, sure, yeah, we can do it,” Navarro recalls. “So then the project gets greenlit, and they send us an invoice, so now we’re thinking, well, now we need to build a company, and we’re going to need a modeller, a designer, an animator, somebody who takes care of lighting, rendering and compositing, and someone who will take care of VFX and dynamics.
“We found those people, and each became a partner. We started the company, opened a bank account, printed the invoices, and that’s how the company started!”
Today the company employs dozens of people, and it’s a mark of Exodo’s success that US or Canadian companies have frequently recruited talented artists from the company. However, one thing that can’t be transplanted is the deep cultural insight of Exodo and its founders, who draw upon Mexican and Latin American stories and culture for their ideas and artwork.
“I would say to the people we meet at Expo that one of the greatest opportunities you have with us is to be able to draw not just on new properties, but also in properties that are inclusive, and draw from this rich, unexplored world of ideas that come from Latin America,” Navarro said. “One could spend a lifetime in every country and still not grasp all the richness of the stories, imagery, culture, and the cosmogony that comes from this region.”
Now, as a larger and widely respected animation studio, Exodo is attending Expo with the goal of finding partners who want their licenses brought to life.
“We’re always looking for two kinds of deals,” Navarro explains. One is people who are interested in acquiring our properties, but also people who are interested in putting their license or their ideas literally into motion.
“So it’s been very fruitful and very important for us not only to say, hey, we have a license that we can, you know, sell or whatever, but also, we can give you an advantage on your license, we can give you that extra step to create content, because there are a lot of properties in the Expo that sell very well, but if they have a little bit of quality content on YouTube and Instagram, for example, they will just go ballistic.
“And that’s one of the things that we have going for us, because we have our own content, but we can also create content for your property.”
You can see Exodo Animation at Licensing Expo at Booth S254, and make appointments through the Licensing Expo match- making application.
As well, if you’d like to reach out directly, contact Paco Navarro by email at navarro@ exodoanimation.com.
Authentic Brands Working With Global Citizen to End Extreme Poverty