Little bear? Big hit! (for Nelvana).

An important member of Nelvana's classic line of animated shows is Little Bear. This adaptation of Else Holmelund Minarik's books is remarkably faithful to the spirit of her prose and to the design sense of Maurice Sendak, who illustrated the works. Currently in wide release in over 100 territories including Germany, the U.K. and France, this hit program is broadcast on Nickelodeon's Nick Jr. in the United States and the CBC in Canada.

Minarik, a schoolteacher, deliberately crafted her writing to reflect a child's point of view. Little Bear's relationships with his family, best friend Emily and animal pals have a special whimsical feeling that continues to delight readers. Airy and sentimental, Minarik's vocabulary found its perfect correlation in the delicate illustrative style of Sendak. The acclaimed Caldecott Award-winning writer and illustrator of Where The Wild Things Are, Sendak recalls that "as a young man, illustrating the Little Bear books provided me with the rare opportunity of imbuing Else Holmelund Minarik's emotionally wrought characters with very personal aspects of my own childhood."

While Nelvana's writing staff has done a fine job in maintaining Minarik's distinctive characters and plots, their animation team has worked wonders to reproduce Sendak's crosshatching style and subtle colour palette. Little Bear is coloured and composited on Nelvana's in-house computer using Cambridge Animated Systems' Animo software. The system offers a much wider colour range and more choice in rendering styles. "You can see right away what you're getting and run it 50 times to finesse it before it is printed," remarks Hasmi Giakoumis, the original producer of the show.