Poulin Baker Animation Studios

"Poulin Baker" and "Poulin-Baker" redirect here.

Poulin Baker Animation Studios is a French/American film studio and a subsidiary of Dalmatian Productions. It took on its current name in 1975. Films produced by The Baker Company and Poulin Baker Ordinateur Studios are also released under this brand. Their most famous creation is Peppa Pig.

The Little Cats
Poulin created a comic strip named Les Petits Chats, or The Little Cats. Produced and distributed by Poulin's own Little Cats Group, it focused on three young mischievous stray cat siblings, Marie, Missy and Thomas, who commonly got in trouble with their mother. At the start of the strip, Poulin had little to no drawing skill, and so the strip reflected that. However, Poulin improved by the end of the strip. The format of The Little Cats was an "adventure-of-the-week" type. It began on 31 January 1901, and ended on 5 September 1904, due to the comic strip's (and comics in general) relative unpopularity in France and Belgium at the time.

After The Little Cats ended, Poulin renamed Little Cats Group to Poulin Productions and drew funny advertisements for companies. It wasn't until 1907 when Poulin was able to get distribution for The Little Cats in the United States, when the strip was translated to English and distributed by World Feature Service. This English-translated version lasted till 1910, but due to the strip being popular, new adventures were created for it until 1939, and after that, it switched to a monthly comic book format and continued through to the 1990s.

Both the original and redrawn versions of the comics are available on littlecatscomic.com.

Poulin Productions
In 1909, Poulin finished a cartoon that he called "Comics in Motion". The cartoon was more of an animated slideshow and featured two black peccaries he would soon call Missy and Georges in the next 1915 cartoon, Missy the Little Pig. Missy was renamed Pecca in The Adventures of Pecca to distinguish her from the cat Missy. By 1918, three distributors were looking to pick up the Pecca cartoons: National Exchange, International Film Syndication and Kädzer Distributors. National and International were both defunct by 1919 and Kädzer was no longer interested, so Paramount Pictures was chosen to distribute all cartoons made by Poulin. Their partnership continued until 1951.

Poulin Productions shut down in 1927.

Polacolor
In the 1910s, Poulin was experimenting with a color process. When it was finished in 1919, it was given the name Polacolor. Originally it could only record in red and green or red and blue, but in 1932 it was improved to use red, green and blue. This improved Polacolor process was first used in the 1932 Peppatoons. Polacolor was last used in the 1983 film Walt and Co. and replaced by an early digital color process.

Poulin-Baker Cartoon Studios
In 1929, Poulin reformed Poulin Productions as Poulin-Baker Productions. In 1930, with the beginning of Peppatoons, Pecca was renamed Peppa but retained her peccary appearance until 1931 when she was recolored to be a pink pig with three-strip Polacolor. Dippy Ditties was created in 1934 and was black and white until 1939, and Peppa still appeared a peccary in that series until then.

Poulin-Baker was one of the last to use the rubber hose animation style, finally conforming to the Disney style around 1970.

Poulin-Baker's films were a success in the 1960s, and so it was bought by the comic strip and cartoon company Dalmatian Productions in 1965. Poulin and Baker became the presidents of Dalmatian in 1967. Poulin died in 1972, and so Poulin's daughter Delphine Poulin inherited the company. She started collaboration with Records on Wheels, and some Poulin-Baker records were created.

In 1981, Poulin Baker formed the Poulin Baker Computer Group. The first use of PBCG hardware was in Walt and Co. in 1983. The title sequence of Walt and Co. is the earliest computer generated title sequence.

Baker retired in 1991 at the age of 101. Before he retired, he unknowingly sold Dalmatian to Polish-American fraud artist Bogdan Brzezicki. Brzezicki had failed to buy Central Pictures and merged Poulin Baker with his own company Central Studios Inc., forming Poulin-Baker-Central Studio Corporation Inc. PBC was short-lived and only made nine productions under the name from November 1991 to March 1992. Baker returned to the studio the following month and sent Brzezicki to jail, changed PBC's name back to Poulin Baker and split the live-action production unit off, forming The Baker Company. He also paid $2,000,000 to Central Pictures. Baker died on July 2, 1993.

In 2001, Records on Wheels (Entertainment One) announced a deal with Dalmatian to make new original and based films (and TV series) on collaboration. In 2019, the companies severed ties due to the acquisition of E1 by Hasbro, according to Delphine, a "Disney-level evil corporation". As of 2019, Poulin Baker distributes its films through Dalmatian and refuses acquisition deals.

Poulin-Baker Television
In 1949, a television division, Screen Rhapsody, was established. It was originally created to distribute old Poulin and Poulin-Baker cartoons to television.

In 1955, a Peppa Pig sequel started production. It was canceled because Poulin said the story was too small-scale for a feature film. The film was split up and broadcast as the first episodes of The Peppa Pig Show on CBS on pan and scan. The Poulin-Baker animators were on a rush and were forced to finish the film quickly, resulting in cheap-looking animation to finish the film. Restored versions of the film can now be found on the Peppa Pig: The Original Series DVD bundle.

A sequel was eventually released in 1962.

In 1958, most of the Poulin-Baker short cartoon team was sent to Screen Rhapsody to start production on new episodes of The Peppa Pig Show. The show was self-distributed until 1962.

Poulin-Baker did not think of animation as something for children only during this era, pioneering the Animation Renaissance in the late 1980s. They also put quality over quantity, something they had been aiming for since the Little Cats era.

Poulin Baker Home Entertainment
Poulin Baker Home Entertainment was formed in 1977 as a partnership with Magnetic Video. The first video put up by PBHE was the Peppa Pig: The Golden Boots LaserDisc in 1979.

Television shows

 * The Peppa Pig Show (1957, 1958-1964, 1969-1973)
 * The Little Cats Show (1960-1966, 1969-1973)
 * The Mouse House (1962 TV series) (1962-1966)
 * Peppa and Friends (1988-2000)
 * The Mouse House (1990 TV series) (1990–1991)
 * The Little Cats (1992 TV series) (1992-2001)
 * One of the earliest cartoons to use a 20 minute segment format.
 * Peppa Pig Tales (2006-)
 * Takes place in the "Peppa Pig universe", which contains all canon Peppa Pig media since the original 1909 cartoons. The Little Cats is a segment on the show. Variety show.

Films
Poulin Baker has released no CGI films.

Trivia

 * Not unlike Fleischer, Poulin-Baker was also creating their cartoons through Paramount.