Archive notice: This article was originally published on June 23, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Thanks to the deal with London design studio Primal Screen, Scandinavia and Great Britain will now also get to see the lively “Maya the Bee”. The successful German/Austrian animated film will be shown in cinemas in Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The film has so far been shown in 170 territories, including North America.
Maya the Bee was presented in 2014 for the first time since the 1970s in a new edition as a stereoscopic 3D animated film. Stuttgart studio M.A.R.K.13 was responsible; in 2012 it had already produced Knight Rusty for the big screen. In Germany, the film was funded by Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg (MFG), the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) and the German Federal Film Board (FFA). But the project also received grants from the local film funding body in Australia.
This resulted in an Australian-German co-production between Studio 100 Media and Buzz Studios. Flying Bark Productions was responsible as the creative Australian lead studio for animation, set dressing and resolution of the story. M.A.R.K.13 was responsible for shading, texturing, lighting, VFX, rendering and compositing. Maya was an enormous computational effort: The approximately 117,000 detailed images were rendered at the Stuttgart High Performance Computing Center (HLRS). More about this in our DP issue 07 : 2014.
And yes, only one person in Germany can croak like that: Willi is voiced by singer Jan Delay.