How did the studio begin?
Lumatic was founded by five people who met at the film and television school in Potsdam, near Berlin. We did not all study in the same class, but we came to know one another by working on each other’s graduation films, where our first collaborations and short films began.
After school, our first step was to found a collective in Berlin called Talking Animals. At the start, it brought together 14 people from different backgrounds — 2D animation, 3D animation, and sound — and we opened an atelier that recreated the shared working environment we had known at school. Everyone operated as an independent artist while working in the same space and under the same name. To clients, we appeared as a single entity, almost a menu of different people and styles, which proved an advantage. Projects then came to life, alone or in small groups.
We ran the collective on a principle of no hierarchy: everyone decided on everything. This democratic process was demanding and, over time, exhausting. Eventually, decision-making grew too complex for the group to keep functioning.
By then, we were established as co-producers, combining external film funds with student-film budgets to enjoy a little of both worlds. With 2D, 3D and sound under one roof, we could produce independently. But the company outgrew that phase: the 2D and 3D members were pulling in different directions. The 2D artists wanted to keep working on small independent projects, while the 3D artists had bigger ambitions that required larger facilities and budgets. So we split the collective, and that is how Lumatic was founded — still the same five talents who had met at school years before!
Can you give us an overview of the work you have produced?
Before our first feature film, we directed three shorts. The first, Our Wonderful Nature, was a nature-film parody — a cross between animation and an animal documentary. We then moved on to my graduation film, Flamingo Pride, a far more ambitious production made in collaboration with the school and independently through Talking Animals, with external funding and a separate team. The budgets were still small for this kind of work; it took three years to produce, and it was produced stereoscopically, which made everything more complicated. It too had a successful festival run and won international recognition.
After Lumatic was established, we produced a second episode of Our Wonderful Nature entirely in-house. That was our first independent in-house production and the moment Lumatic emerged in the industry as a talented German animation studio.
Then came Dragon Rider, a very big animated feature film. It took a long time to raise the budget, find the partners and build the infrastructure. The project was an epic adventure with many locations and characters, conceived to become the biggest family-entertainment film ever produced in Europe. Lumatic was the creative headquarters of the production, which took five years.
It was your first major success, yet it was released during COVID.
I have not seen anything bigger since. It had global distribution without an American budget, but the timing was deeply unfortunate, and there was nothing we could do — it was simply the worst moment to release a film in recent cinema history. It was not the commercial success everyone had hoped for, though it stayed in cinemas for a long time. Animation was also one of the few areas that were still able to function during COVID, with limited capacity and remote work.
Around that time, a producer bought the rights to School of Magical Animals, aiming for a hybrid production in which animated characters would interact with live-action actors. They approached us to bring those characters to a level that would satisfy the directors and producers. We were first brought in as external help, but the work eventually moved in-house. It was not trivial to define the style they were after, or to navigate a production rooted in live action, where the subtleties of character animation were not fully understood. We were glad to help, and we created the first three animals of the series — a fox, a turtle and a bird.
The film was a huge local success — everything the feature had been meant to be but never had the chance to become. Fans of the books, and the children who loved them, loved seeing the characters come to life, and the timing was far healthier. It became the most-viewed film in Germany on release, and we won the award for best visual effects at the German Film Awards.
That first film led to a sequel and then a prequel, and the film we are now nominated for is the fourth in the series. It has been a producer’s dream. Each new film adds two more animals to the ensemble, so our workload — and the studio — keeps growing. This has been a healthy growth, somewhat untypical for visual-effects companies: we did not grow too fast, or expand on the back of a single project by hiring people we could not keep. We also stayed focused on character animation even within a visual-effects project, and we gained real know-how in high-end production. We always push for the best possible result, because our internal standards are high and we love the work. It is never a one-person effort; the work changes hands all the time.
This gives Lumatic a strong reputation in visual effects and 3D animation. Can you tell us about that side of the business?
Alongside character animation, we have held various roles across different projects — from co-production and service work to developing our own IPs in-house. We also do classical visual effects, for which the German market offers more opportunities: set extensions, wire removal and similar work. We currently have a major visual-effects production underway, a German science-fiction film called Atos, made for IMAX, with some characters but mostly world and production design.
Early on, we also did a little game work and sales teasers for projects seeking proof of concept. These smaller projects need smaller teams and budgets, but are valuable nonetheless. The key is to keep working at all times — to keep the engine running. That is probably the greatest challenge of running an animation and visual-effects studio of our size.
This year is your first time exhibiting at Annecy.
We have been to Annecy many times, but this is the first time we will have a stand at the MIFA market, engaging international as well as German clients and looking for new collaborations. We hope to pitch our original IPs; the best outcome would be to bring partners on board for one of the productions we have developed internally. We also want to offer our know-how as a service provider in visual effects and character animation. We look for projects that interest us — a chance to explore something new or to develop our existing strengths — but we are happy to talk to anyone about anything.
Could cross-IP development be a valid strategy for an animation studio?
It is hard to keep an animation studio alive, because everything has to keep running all the time. Even so, developing IPs feels like a natural part of this business — taking a concept and finding innovative ways to reach people. I find it intriguing because I believe there is an audience for everything we develop here, and that only opportunity stands between that potential and that audience. I could not keep investing for months or years without that core belief. People are hungry for content; even in an oversaturated market with short attention spans, they still appreciate and recognise quality when something is simply honest.
By honest, do you mean genuine?
I mean something that was not done as a compromise, but with heart and soul. I believe people recognise that, and want more of it. The work we do is demanding, expensive, exhausting and complicated, but the principle still holds. What audiences ultimately want is to feel valued — not to be treated as fuel for a money-making machine.
What kind of positioning do animation studios need today?
The animation world is changing fast, partly because the filters that once stood between the producer and the final audience are breaking down. Studios need to learn how to speak directly to that audience. I even think it will get easier, because AI is changing everything. Ignoring it would be foolish, and fighting it is pointless — it is happening, and it is changing everything. What matters is understanding that working with AI is a back-and-forth between human and machine. It is not about who produces the better result; it is about the process.
Can we go deeper into this “dialogue with AI”?
AI is a dialogue between the human and the machine. It can get us to a sketch that looks close to the final result faster, and, used that way, it is at its best. If we can reach something close to the final product quickly and cheaply, we can focus on actual production on everything the machine cannot do. That is a far better starting point, and I think it is where AI will have its biggest impact on the industry.
The world is hungry for content, but time and resources are always limited, and at some point, things have to be produced. If sketches resembling the final work can be made faster and more cheaply, capacity is freed for content that could not be made before — at least, that is my hope. A good script with little money will still be forgiven by audiences, but it never works the other way around. As production value becomes easier to fake and harder to attribute to a human, the focus on content only grows stronger.
How do you see the future of your company, and of animation in Europe?
In Germany, we have been privileged to work on the finest productions available, and we are grateful. But there are limits. The IPs we are pitching now are simply too large for the local industry alone, so we have to think about partnerships — and partnership within Europe means combining resources from different countries to raise enough money. The co-production system, however, often forces you to break the production apart and spread it across many houses, which is far from ideal. The more co-producers you have, the more expensive the film becomes, and eventually it becomes more about keeping everyone’s business running than about the film itself. That is one of the real problems in the system here.
I would like to believe that producing quality will become faster, easier and cheaper — not because people are cheating, but because they are learning to use the tools constructively. The human must always have the final touch: whatever happens behind the scenes, what ends up on screen should be man-made. That should not be compromised. We are still in the trial-and-error phase, and it is too early to draw conclusions. But if this works, it could soften the barrier for studios like ours, which cannot yet pull off a feature alone, even though we have the know-how to take such a project from A to Z. Perhaps one day a high-quality feature will no longer require a multi-million euro budget — and perhaps the timeline will shorten too.
The distance between concept and finished film is one of the hardest things to manage. Animation is the purest expression of art, but it is also a challenge in terms of time-to-market. It is not only the working process; it is finding the financing, the team and all the steps in between. After short films, a feature, and now this hybrid franchise, I can say that animation always takes forever, whatever the technique or length. It is simply extremely time-consuming, and as digital tools advance so quickly, everyone hopes we can finally get things done faster.
And what about short films in cinemas?
That would be wonderful. There are real works of art among short films, but they lack a connection to the market, to distribution. There is not enough awareness or culture around them. Yet I am certain that the moment they were programmed, an audience would be waiting.
