Firing on All Cylinders
At 31, Bardel Animation continues to impress by providing its comprehensive soup-to-nuts approach to 2D and CG animation clients.
At 31, Bardel Animation continues to impress by providing its comprehensive soup-to-nuts approach to 2D and CG animation clients.
Vancouver’s Bardel Entertainment is 31 years old this June, but judging from the diversity and volume of its current projects, this powerhouse toon studio is showing no signs of slowing down. Originally founded by the husband-and-wife team of Barry Ward and Delna Bhesania (the name of the studio is a combination of their names), the studio was acquired by Italy’s Rainbow in 2015.
Bardel is now led by industry veteran CEO Rick Mischel, who joined the company after several years at Sony Pictures Animation as producer of the Cloudy with a Chance
of Meatballs and Hotel Transylvania TV shows, and senior VP for Sony Pictures Imageworks, launching and managing the studio’s Vancouver studio.
“We are known today for producing feature film-quality animated TV shows,” says Mischel.
“Bardel has a proven track record delivering cinematic-quality TV shows for the big-brand movie franchises such as King Julien (DreamWorks), Angry Birds Blues (Rovio), Puss in Boots (DreamWorks) and Teen Titans Go! (Warner Bros.)”
Mischel says Bardel is one of the only animation service providers that offers both a 2D and 3D CG pipeline for animated TV shows. “Bardel’s strength is our ability to create a distinctive animation style tailored to our client’s creative needs,” he notes. “As a one-stop shop, Bardel offers a ‘soup to nuts’ approach; can help the realization of a project at a high level of creative excellence; nurturing an idea from visual design to the full realization and delivery of a project.”
Mischel also points out that Bardel is now able to produce low-budget animated features with a new $15-30 million-dollar pipeline. “We think our creative talent can offer a strong quality bar for this level of animated feature,” he notes. “Bardel’s low budget feature film pipeline was honed by the skills of our artists garnered
“Technology is rapidly changing and as a studio, you must stay on the cutting edge of art, technology and commerce to thrive in this industry. On one hand, it’s a more chaotic time than ever. But on the other hand, it’s also a more exciting time than ever!” — Bardel CEO Rick Mischel
through working on The Prophet, as well as four seasons of the award-winning series Rick and Morty and the historic four TV series deal with DreamWorks (VeggieTales, Dinotrux, All Hail King Julien and Puss in Boots), as well as our recent cinematic show The Dragon Prince, which airs on Netflix.”
A Flexible Menu
Today, Bardel has about 500 employees in two state-of-the-art studios, one in Vancouver and one in Kelowna, Canada, and a fully integrated studio in Rome, Italy. “There was a brief period where Bardel had 700 employees and 17 different segments of shows rolling off and on at the same time,” says Mischel. “While that attests to our production management strength, we’ve now focused on higher-level productions, with a core group of 500 artists on five to seven shows and a low-budget feature.”
For its 2D animation projects, Bardel uses Harmony, Flash and Maya, and for CG animation projects, the studio mainly uses Maya, with several proprietary creative tools developed by its in-house tech team.
According to Mischel, the team at Bardel is constantly working on improving its artistic culture to nurture creative talent in an atmosphere of transparency and respect. “We’ve been successful at attracting some of the best talent in Vancouver due to the quality and challenges of our projects, so we work hard at continuing those recruitment efforts in our markets,” he adds. “We have an incredible technology team who are constantly improving our production pipeline by incorporating modern technology solutions which allow our artists to work seamlessly at their highest level of creative excellence.”