''Pingu'' is a stop motion animated children's television series originally produced in Switzerland. It was co-created by Otmar Gutmann and Erika Brueggemann. It centres on the titular anthropomorphic

emperor penguin The emperor penguin (''Aptenodytes forsteri'') is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and is Endemism in birds, endemic to Antarctica. The male and female are similar in plumage and size, reaching in length and weighing fr ...

and his family, who live in the

South Pole The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is the point in the Southern Hemisphere where the Earth's rotation, Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True South Pole to distinguish ...

. The series aired on SF DRS for four series from 7 March 1990 to 9 April 2000, and was produced by the Swiss animation studio Pingu Filmstudio; with Swiss toy company Editoy AG, and later on, Pingu BV handling IP ownership of the series. The series has been popular outside of Switzerland, particularly in the United Kingdom and Japan, in part due to its lack of a real spoken language. Nearly all dialogue is in an invented grammelot "penguin language" referred to as 'Penguinese' or 'Pinguish', consisting of babbling, muttering, and the titular character's characteristic sporadic honking sound, which can be popularly recognized as "Noot noot!" or other variants, accompanied by turning his beak into a megaphone-like shape. In the first four series, all the characters were performed by Italian voice actor Carlo Bonomi, using a language of sounds he had already developed and used earlier for Osvaldo Cavandoli's '' La Linea''. After British children's company

HIT Entertainment HIT Entertainment Limited (stylised as HiT) was a British-American entertainment company founded in 1982 as Henson International Television, the international distribution arm of The Jim Henson Company, by Jim Henson, Peter Orton, and Sophie Turn ...

purchased Pingu BV in 2001, they produced a revival run of Pingu for two additional series in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

through their in-house studio Hot Animation, which aired on

CBeebies CBeebies is a British free-to-air Public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, public broadcast children's television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is also the brand used for all BBC content targeted for children aged six year ...

from 1August 2003 to 3March 2006. It was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2005. The characters were jointly voiced by David Sant and Marcello Magni. A computer-animated revival series with two seasons produced in Japan for

NHK , also known by its Romanization of Japanese, romanized initialism NHK, is a Japanese public broadcasting, public broadcaster. It is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television licence, television license fee. NHK ope ...

, entitled '' Pingu in the City'', aired from 7October 2017 to 30March 2019. A third revival series, being animated in stop-motion like the original, is currently under development at Mattel Television and Aardman Animations. The IP rights to Pingu are currently held by an entity owned by HIT/Mattel named Joker, Inc., which is usually called through its trade name "The Pygos Group" on copyright and trademark notices related to the ''Pingu'' property.

Storyline

The program is set in

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. ...

and focuses around penguin families living and working in igloos. The main character, Pingu, belongs to one such family. He frequently goes on adventures with his little sister, Pinga, and often gets into mischief with his best friend, Robby, and his love interest, Pingi.

Production history

In 1984, Erika Brueggemann was working at Schweizer Fernsehen (the German-speaking division of SRG SSR) when she was introduced to animator Otmar Gutmann. Gutmann pitched a

clay animation Claymation, sometimes called clay animation or plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine cl ...

show starring sea lions who crawled around in a funny way. Erika Brueggemann liked the idea of a clay cartoon character, but she preferred the clay penguins that Gutmann had made. She suggested that the main character should walk upright like a human and asked, "Why not a penguin?" Brueggemann's colleague, Guido Steiger, agreed with her idea. Gutmann was not immediately convinced, since he had already created many sea lion characters out of plasticine, but he eventually pushed forward with the penguin idea too. According to Erika Brueggemann, she gave "countless demonstrations on my part about how 'my' penguin had to move and act". From this framework, Brueggemann, Gutmann and their team created a seven-minute pilot, "Pingu: Eine Geschichte Für Kinder Im Vorschulalter", which was finished in 1986. The pilot was screened at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Kleiner Baer award. Its positive reception persuaded the director of Schweizer Fernsehen, , to commission an entire series of ''Pingu'' cartoons. The series began production in 1988 and started airing on SF DRS from 1990–2000, originally consisting of 104 five-minute episodes and one special 25-minute episode. The original stories were written by Brueggemann and Guido Steiger, and some of the later stories were written by Silvio Mazzola. These episodes were animated at Trickfilmstudio in Russikon, Switzerland. In the styling of voices, a retroscript was chosen, and all voices were performed by Italian voice actor Carlo Bonomi without a script, using a language of noises he had already developed and used for Osvaldo Cavandoli's '' La Linea''. This feature enabled people of diverse linguistic backgrounds to follow the story. In 1993, David Hasselhoff released a single titled "Pingu Dance", a rap song (in Switzerland only) based on the ''Pingu'' shorts and featuring samples of Penguinese. A portion of the song is used as the theme to ''Pingu'' in the third and fourth series, as well as the re-dubs of the first two series. It was also heard in the re-dubbed version of the episode "Pingu Looks After the Egg" (retitled "Pingu Helps with Incubating"), replacing the " Woodpeckers from Space" song from the original version. A special 25-minute episode, '' Pingu at the Wedding Party'', was also produced in 1997 and introduced a family of green penguins.

HIT Entertainment buyout

On 29October 2001,

bought the rights to the series, including the original 104 episodes and the wedding special, for £15.9 million. HIT later revived the show and produced a further 52 episodes from 2003–2006. These episodes were animated through stop motion like the original, but used resin casts of the original clay puppets, which had deteriorated by this time. The HIT Entertainment episodes were made by a completely new team at HOT Animation, but co-creator Erika Brueggemann still traveled to the company's headquarters in the United Kingdom to check on production. At the time, she said, "Last year a production company from England bought everything... I traveled to Manchester last summer and met their highly motivated team who worked with great commitment, humor and responsibility towards children. I think Pingu is in good hands now." Contrary to some sources, there was never any CGI used in these later episodes. When HIT Entertainment bought the rights, Carlo Bonomi was replaced with new voice actors Marcello Magni and David Sant. Magni and Sant, Italian and Spanish actors based in London, both had mime and clowning backgrounds and were already aware of the clown language grammelot, on which the penguin language was based. In February 2012,

Mattel Mattel, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational corporation, multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company headquartered in El Segundo, California. Founded in Los Angeles by Harold Matson and the husband-and-wife duo of Ruth Handler, ...

acquired Pingu through its purchase of HIT Entertainment which was rebranded to Mattel Television shortly after.

Japanese popularity and ''Pingu in the City''

From its debut in the country in 1992, ''Pingu'' became well known in Japan. According to writer Silvio Mazzola in 1996, ''Pingu'' was most popular with high-school girls, with over 90% of Japanese girls aged 13–17 knowing about it. In 2020, an exhibition event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the original "Hugo" animation was held in Tokyo. ''Pingu'' currently airs as part of NHK's children's program ''Nyanchu's World'', and also on Cartoon Network Japan. Various merchandise exclusive to the country has been created, including tie-in toys with KFC and Mister Donut, as well as various video games. A Japanese-produced reboot of the series, titled was announced in 2017. It premiered on NHK-E on 7October 2017. Unlike its previous series, it is computer-animated, and features Pingu and his family moving to a big city. Each episode involves Pingu attempting to help out anyone there with their jobs, although he usually messes it up. The series was produced by Polygon Pictures in the same style of the original stop motion series through computer animation. It was directed by Naomi Iwata and written by both Kimiko Ueno and Shigenori Tanabe, with music done by Ken Arai. It features voices by Ryota Iwasaki and Fumiya Tanaka, in a similar style to Carlo Bonomi, David Sant, and Marcello Magni.

Second revival

On 21October 2024, it was announced that a remake of the series was being co-developed by Aardman Animations and Mattel Television.

Reception

''Pingu'' has received mostly positive reviews. Common Sense Media gave it 4 out of 5 stars, stating: "Parents need to know that this claymation series is funny, endearing, and entertaining. Although tis appropriate for all ages, the plots might be difficult for the youngest viewers to follow". According to a 2008 ''

Slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

'' article, the series is "an international sensation", but still remains obscure among American audiences.

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