SINGAPORE, Nov 16 — It is not every day that you see a 13-year-old Singaporean girl making her mark in the United States. But Sarah Loh managed to do just that with her new animated series, SazzyPets — created from her drawings when she was just eight years old — after she and her parents clinched a deal with US media house Global Genesis Group (GGS) to distribute it on Amazon.
The series originated from a website of the same name that was launched in 2012 by her parents’ company, private equity firm First Alverstone Partners. The site (sazzypets.com) was an interactive one that came complete with fun games and information about the characters drawn by Sarah.
After her parents Gary Loh, 50, and Selena Cheng, 46, showed GSS a SazzyPets trailer during French conference Mipcom, it decided to sign a deal with First Alverstone Partners in late July. The deal gave GGS, a full-service production, distribution and IP management company, exclusive rights to distribute SazzyPets on Amazon Prime and Amazon Digital worldwide.
The first episode of its first season, which will contain 26 episodes that are each 10 minutes long, made its debut last month, rolling out in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.
“So far, feedback (on the show) has been positive; reviews have been positive as well,” Gary told TODAY.
Passion for the arts
SazzyPets explores the lives of various animals living in the magical kingdom of Sazzyland, where magical trees and rainbow-juice fountains reside. The main character, Sazzy, is a little goat princess who lives in her own kingdom with seven of her SazzyPets friends, such as Fluphinaa, a cat; and Gazzy, a snake.
Sarah first began drawing these characters when she was eight, with her first character being a unicorn — who later became “Uni” in the series. She then began drawing more and more characters, chalking up some 30 of them.
“When I was eight, my dream was to build a story and a game that could be enjoyed by kids of all ages,” explained Sarah.
As a first step, her parents got a software team from India to incorporate Sarah’s drawings of the SazzyPet characters into a website with a series of games — an effort that cost about US$100,000 (RM441,045) in total. The next step, was to convert her drawings and characters into an animated series, as Sarah wanted her creations to be seen by more people.
A total of 17 animators from the Philippines and three scriptwriters from the US were employed to produce the series. The animators took Sarah’s drawings and turned them into three-dimensional ones, while the scriptwriters wrote up the episodes for season one.
Eight of her characters eventually appeared in the first season of SazzyPets, and every episode has an educational and positive message that kids can learn from. For example, she said, characters in the show always display kindness towards one another.
“It is supposed to teach kids that you are supposed to be kind to your friends so you will grow up to be a good person,” she said. The show also teaches kids to care more about the environment, such as the need to keep the parks clean, she added.
Although Sarah was happy doing what she loves, she eventually faced challenges balancing school and work for the series. “It (the workload) was kind of the reason why I had to stop contributing for a while,” shared Sarah, who is studying at Methodist Girls’ School.
While she was hands-on with the project when she was between eight and 10 years old — sketching everything from the characters to the magical trees — she stopped drawing for SazzyPets when she was 11, while the series was being produced.
In turn, she took on a different role — as a chief editor overseeing the production.
These include looking through the storyboards, scripts, character voice-overs and music produced by the team, and offering her input before clearing them. Nine episodes have been completed so far.
Besides an animated series, related merchandise, such as backpacks, pencil cases and wallets (priced from S$16.90 to S$49.90 or RM to RM), has been introduced on the website as well.
And most recently, global distributor and marketer of fresh fruits, vegetables and nutritious products SunMoon entered into a licensee agreement with SazzyPets to produce the brand’s food and beverage items such as Sazzy Fruit Cups and Sazzy Jelly Treats, which will be sold from Jan 1 next year.
With SazzyPets being less than two months old and already reaching a global mass audience, Sarah hopes to bring her series to other countries such as South Korea and Indonesia. The show already has the option of being heard in English, Chinese, German or Japanese, but she is looking to introduce Korean, Tamil and Hindu as well. Her reason? “So they can understand this (show),” she said simply.
On how her dream turned out, Sarah said: “I won’t say it’s successful as it’s relatively new and there hasn’t even been any marketing. I plan on trying to build up a social-media network around that.”
“Based on that, I hope we can gain more popularity and make it much more successful than it is now,” she added.
Animated series SazzyPets is available on Amazon Prime and Amazon Digital, while the merchandise can be purchased at the SazzyPets official website at www.sazzypets.com.
The SazzyPets food and beverage range with SunMoon will also be available on its e-commerce platform, www.sunmoondirect.com, from Jan 1, next year. — TODAY
