Rovio Announces Angry Birds Animated Series, Film In The Works

This week Angry Birds developer Rovio announced its hit mobile title will make the transition from game to movie and animated series formats. Rovio hopes to emphasize the storyline and personalities of the different Angry Birds characters in 52 short episodes. During this week’s announcement in Cannes, France, Rovio’s head of animation, Nick Dorra, said, “It will, in the future, be less and less about the slingshot and more about the characters and their adventures and all different kinds of games in different forms.” The series will be viewable on “all possible platforms,” running at one episode per week beginning sometime this year. The company hopes to please fans by fleshing out the story and world of the beloved series. Additionally it hopes to bring the franchise to people who don’t or can’t play the game. height=350 A Helsinki-based animation studio has already been at work on some holiday-based animated shorts, released alongside the previous installment of the game, Angry Birds Seasons.  Last year the company aired a Christmas-themed animated short on Nickelodeon called Wreck the Halls – a simple and dialogue-free Christmas tale in which the Angry Birds must get their stolen presents back from the evil pigs. In 2011, the company announced it had begun working on a film version of the popular title, bringing on board former chairman of Marvel studios, David Maisel. The film version of the game is planned to be released sometime in 2015. Late last month the Angry Birds series had another huge hit on its hands with the release of Angry Birds Space. The title was downloaded more than 10 million times in less than three days. To date, more than 700 million copies of the Angry Birds games have been downloaded across all mobile platforms. A short, animated web series seems to be a good fit for the game to develop its franchise outside of the game platform. However, an 80- or 90-minute movie might be going a little overboard. But who knows? Maybe Rovio will be able to make its cast of Angry Birds far more interesting than I could imagine.