Preview from issue #005 | March 2020 | This article is made available for free by Fredrikstad Animation Festival
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Bingo!
Frank Mosvold talk about Ella Bella Bingo Frank Mosvold is the brains behind Ella Bella Bingo, the beloved animated TV series that has just launched a feature film. To call him a “producer” doesn’t really do justice to the full scope of his vision, his involvement, and his influence on his projects and on the Nordic animation community. Currently busy traveling with the premiere of the Ella Bella Bingo movie, he took time for an interview with WeAnimate.
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 Photo: Tore Skaar
WA: Firstly, congratulations on the spectacular success of Ella Bella Bingo. It’s broadcast around the world, and been on the air for over ten years… you’ve been working with it for all that time, and must have been in development for a year or two before that.
FM: Actually, that’s a funny story. In 2009 we were working with NRK (the Norwegian public broadcaster) on a project called “Babboo”, about a monkey. Cartoon Forum was in Norway that year, and it was important for us as a Norwegian studio to be there and represent well, so we were going to pitch it at Cartoon Forum, with the support of NRK. The Friday before our meeting, NRK called me up and said that they didn’t like the Babboo trailer, and were withdrawing from the project. So, off the top of my head, I lied and told them, “Well, we are also working on another project you might like. If I can present it to you on Wednesday, can we still make the Cartoon Forum deadline?”, and they agreed. When I got off the phone with them, I went to my designer, Tom Petter Hansen, and said “You know that picture you drew of your daughter? I always liked that, so let’s make a TV series around it. It will be loosely based on your life; the story of an active girl with a single father, living in the apartment building you live in. We need to add some supporting characters, so let’s add a strict old lady, and a friendly janitor, and she needs friends, so let’s add two twins… can you draw that up over the weekend?” After I talked to Tom Petter, I called my screenwriter buddy, Trond Morten Venaasen, and said “I have a fantastic idea for a new project! I’ll send you the picture of the main character, and then I need some taglines for episodes and some character descriptions.” I described the characters and the setting, and then I named the show after my cousin Elfrid. So that Wednesday morning I got the taglines and the drawings, and I went to NRK and presented it. They said, “This is fantastic! Why didn’t you bring us this before?” They supported the project, we got it into Cartoon Forum, got some broadcasters interested, and got it into production. And the whole thing came from just that single drawing. 
The first ever drawing of Ella Bella Bingo
©Mosvold Studios, all rights reserved WA: Amazing! Are you just the world’s best project pitcher? FM: Well, I don’t like to think of it as “pitching”. Pitching makes me nervous; elevator pitching and saying everything in two sentences make me anxious. So I never ask for pitch meetings. I just ask for a meeting to talk about the project, and show them how enthusiastic I am. People connect with your own enthusiasm. NRK liked Ella Bella Bingo because Nordic audiences at the time were hungry for strong, proactive female characters. Everyone was tired of these passive princess characters, and wanted girls who were more interesting and dynamic. We had this tough, modern, Pippi Longstocking type of character, and that was something they really needed. WA: And the feature grew from that? FM: I always wanted to make it into a feature; that was the plan from the very beginning. The biggest problem was coming up with a story. Our characters were originally a bit shallow, because we only had a week to develop them. In a TV series, your characters can’t have big story arcs, because they can’t evolve; if your character develops over time, you throw off the continuity of the series. The character always has to go back to where they were at the beginning. But that doesn’t work in a feature film, which needs story development and a character arc. The Ella Bella Bingo universe is also unusual in that our stories don’t have bad guys, and it’s difficult to develop a feature film story arc that isn’t based on an antagonist. Some of the characters are flawed, but there isn’t a bad guy, which makes the film warmer and more relatable. WA: How did you resolve that and make it work? FM: If you look at the story arc of a Pixar film, their stories don’t revolve around a simple conflict between good and evil characters. Their stories are all based around the main character losing the thing they love the most. Look at Finding Nemo, and Toy Story… it gives you so much to work with if you take away what people care about and make them work to try to find it, and they grow along the way. |
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