Meet the MobSquad

For those who can’t tune in to MTV Asia/Australia, it’s time to meet the MobSquad, three friends (skateboarding girl Donny Sunshine, big-haired Lenny, and cuddly Gus) with their own bi-weekly animated series Mobbed. The 45-80 second clips are shown on MTV and also distributed on mobile phones (the series is sponsored by Motorola). Whether jamming together in a band or fighting as friends do, the MobSquad crew takes you along on a mini narrative of fast-paced animation fun spiced with a healthy dose of black humor.

The creator of Mobbed is the multi-talented Amsterdam-based designer and art director Fons Schiedon, who has a number of successful animation projects for major clients under his belt, including The Incredible Adventures of Kika and Bob for Discovery Kids, IDs for Nickelodeon, and principal designs for Peter Greenaway’s online game Tulse Luper Journey. Schiedon’s company FONZTEEVEE is a very international production unit that reflects an increasingly globalized media market. Not only does it have clients all over the globe, but his collaborators can also often be a continent away (like the Brazilian animation team BIRDO Studio in Sao Paulo, who worked on Mobbed).

Schiedon describes the key to the antics of the three MobSquad members as entertainingly dysfunctional behavior and the right mix of personalities. As Schiedon explained in an interview (for the new Pictoplasma Character Encyclopaedia): “When working with groups of characters (which I usually do), it’s important to get the group dynamic right. If you look at the monkey, it’s a character that is tailored to have ‘big’ expressions, with his enormous head and oversized eyes. The koala hardly has any means of expressing himself, so his movements are much smaller and less dynamic and he does nothing with his face. A monkey and a koala would make a good couple. If you bring in a large bear that is somewhere in the middle in terms of his range but has a strong presence because of his size, then you have a group that works on screen.”

Although neither monkey, bear nor koala, the Mobbed characters are cute, misbehaved and, yes, brilliantly dysfunctional; the MobSquad definitely works. For a look at the very first episode of Mobbed, tune your browser to:

www.fonztv.nl/fastsite/qt/mobbed/mtvmobbed.htm