Butch Hartman, the creator of Nickelodeon’s The Fairly OddParents, has started his own animation studio to produce and finance original kids programming. 

Based in LA, Butch Hartman Studios has a team of more than 40 staffers working remotely, with frequent Hartman collaborator Taylor Bradbury (Fairly OddParents, Max and the MidKnights) on board as a supervising producer and Hartman’s wife Julieann (The Garden Cartoon) also involved as an executive producer. 

Hartman was motivated to start his own shop after seeing a gap in the market for high-quality faith-based children’s series. He dipped his toes into this white space with 2D-animated series The Garden Cartoon (10 x 22 minutes), which US streaming platform Angel Studios premiered last month. Also available for paid download on Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Google Play, this faith-based toon for five- to eight-year-olds revolves around a lion and a lamb who learn biblical lessons through original songs. 

Hartman’s studio has already started production on a second season, and the brand’s first feature film The Greatest Thing Ever: A Garden Cartoon Movie is completed, with specialist distributor BMG-Global gearing up to release it to home entertainment platforms starting on July 1. 

Hartman is looking to do a lot more in this niche—and also beyond it—as head of his own studio for the first time. He’s got an initial slate planned, and expects the company’s projects will be a 50/50 mix of content that is and isn’t faith-based. The first three in development are Little Harps, Dragon Drive-Thru and Family Fusion, and Hartman is in the market for distributors and consumer products partners.

Little Harps is a faith-based preschool series about a group of guardian angels in training. They use magical harps to help people on Earth with their problems, often making mistakes and learning along the way. Dragon Drive-Thru is a comedy for five to eights about three dragons running a food stand in a medieval town. They work hard to serve up enticing healthy dishes to keep people from dining at a rival stall operated by a villainous purveyor of junk food. 

And the third project, Family Fusion, is a Flintstones/Jetsons-type concept for six to 11s in which the smartest man in the world is neighbors with the 14th-smartest. They often compete to see who can make the neighborhood better with fancy scientific inventions that almost always run amok to great comic effect. 

“I want to show creators that they can do things on their own without going through the traditional gatekeepers—and that independent studios can launch and be successful,” says Hartman. “Our goal is to leave a legacy. We want to leave kids entertained but also feeling enriched by our content, and we want to work with others looking to do the same.”