MONTREAL: Montreal-based children’s producers Henri Desclez and Norma Denys have emerged from a two-year ‘corporate misadventure’ to form Mimosa Productions, a children’s program producer in the La Fete Group. Denys says Mimosa will operate as a creative and development boutique, producing exclusively for kids in animation, multimedia, puppet and live-action formats. As a member of La Fete, producer of the Tales for All feature series and the new Barnum miniseries on Showtime, all Mimosa product will be sold by affiliate exporter Mediamax International.

Mimosa has several new projects in development, and is currently in prepro on the 26 x half-hour animation series Turtle Island, which has been pre-sold to Canal Famille in French-speaking Canada and Germany’s Ravensburger. Delivery on the US$7.2-million series is slated for September.

Turtle Island is a swashbuckling adventure set on a tropical isle. Characters include King Tiki, the last survivor of a great race of Tiki Sea Turtles, Captain Minus, a Rat of lowly origins with big ideas, and Ingrid, the enfant terrible of the local Octopus clan.

European-born Desclez is best known as a designer and storyteller, while Denys is a writer/producer. The partners’ former operation, Desclez Productions, was purchased by Malofilm Communications more than two years ago, and subsequently acquired by Behaviour Communications when it bought out Malofilm in late 1997. The association with Behaviour ended early in 1998.

Desclez’s best known international titles include Iris the Happy Professor, sold by Mediamax International into 20 countries, and the 3-D/puppet series Little Star, sold worldwide by Discovery Communications.