Andrew Kavanagh, Development Executive for Kavaleer says that “Kavaleer have always been a studio that have sought to address gaps in the children’s broadcasting landscape, and when we began work on Alva’s World (formerly Alva and the Trolls) in 2014, we knew that there was a particular issue emerging that we felt an educational cartoon could address”.
That issue was younger and younger children having access to internet enabled devices and encountering both content that was never designed for them, and interacting with strangers in a largely unregulated space. At the time, Andrew had heard this compared to taking a young child to the centre of a big city, giving them the taxi-fare and expecting them to find their way home without anything bad happening to them. He began trying to come up with an analogy for this and took inspiration from ‘The Uses of Enchantment’ by Bruno Bettelheim which suggested that well known tropes in fairy tales helped us make sense of certain situations or relationships. Hansel and Gretel could tell us something about separation anxiety, and the Big Bad Wolf was a metaphor for sublimated fear. Stories are more than just stories, they are the tools we use to explain existence to ourselves. Andrew wondered if it were possible to take the ‘boogeyman’ of our fears about what kids might encounter online and to reverse engineer a set of fairy tales to address real issues kids were encountering.
Bullying was the starting point, but it quickly became apparent that there was much more scope to explain not only the psychology of online encounters but the way the whole thing is built to monetize our attention. There was absolutely no point in creating a dystopian wasteland here- the internet is incredibly useful and we couldn’t imagine modern life functioning without it. Its also an attractive place to kids, they can meet new friends, follow their curiosity and instantly express themselves in ways previous generations could scarcely imagine. And so the kernel of an idea formed, and of course there was already a trope for it, it was Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy in Oz, Oisin in Tir na nOg. A magically compelling place, which might have a few bad eggs knocking about and spoiling everyone else’s fun.
And so, the land of Gizmo was born as the online world in metaphor. It was populated it with Oolies, who represent friends and online connections. And of course, there are Trolls… but Kavaleer also created characters that represent not just the behavioural, but also the functional aspects of the internet; covering topics such as location tracking, game-addiction, and in-app purchasing.
The heroine- Alva- takes a real-world internet-related problem, often too difficult to understand for the audience of 6-8 year olds (or to explain for their parents)- and brings it to her friends in Gizmo to figure it out. Alva, the Oolies and the Trolls ‘act-out’ the problem in a pantomimed way, to help the young viewers unravel the meaning in a way that is designed for their level of comprehension.
The idea was first pitched at the Cartoon Forum in 2016, but it took another four years of research and collaboration to find the right partners for the project and assemble the production finance. Kavaleer worked closely with Cybersafe Kids on the messaging, and as a sounding board to the most efficacious ways of ‘storifying’ issues children were experiencing online.
Andrew notes that “we are on track to complete the first 52 eleven-minute episodes by early 2022. It seems that as long as, and the more we interact with each other through technology, we will have no scarcity of ideas for new adventures for Alva and her friends.”
Alva’s World launched on RTEJr on September 6th and will debut in the UK on Sky Kids on October 18thand YLE (Finland) later in the year.
