CANNES: Some of the world\u2019s top television channels were battling Monday to acquire a \u201cbrilliant\u201d new cartoon series \u201cGrizzy & the Lemmings\u201c, which has already been proclaimed a classic that will \u201crenew the whole slapstick genre.\u201d The show about a lazy brown bear and a band of lemmings who battle for the goodies inside a forest ranger\u2019s lodge in the Canadian Rockies got a rapturous reception at its premiere at the MIPJUNIOR market in the French Riviera resort of Cannes. The US Cartoon Network giant Turner has already snapped it up for its Boomerang channel. Most of the series\u2019 rapid-fire gags turn on the titanic struggles between the grizzly and a horde of kamikaze lemmings for the ranger\u2019s pot of Nutella, games console and smartphone. The slapstick jokes and spectacular pratfalls from the clifftop lodge into the ravine below has led to it being compared to a very smart mix of \u201cThe Road Runner\u201c, \u201cRaving Rabbids\u201d and \u201cMr. Bean.\u201d \u201cWhat can you say, it is just fantastic. They really nailed it,\u201d Janine Weigold, who bought the show for Germany\u2019s Super RTL channel, told AFP. \u201cIt\u2019s brilliant. Once you start you can\u2019t stop watching them… We are glad that German kids are going to be able to enjoy it on free TV.\u201d And its non-verbal humour \u2013 with the bear and lemmings bombing each other in one episode with goods dropped from delivery drones ordered on the smartphone \u2013 had industry insiders predicting it would be \u201cmega everywhere.\u201d \u201cIt is a new classic that will gather families together again in front of the television,\u201d said Tiphaine de Raguenel of France Televisions, which backed the French-based Hari studio to make the first 78 action-packed, seven-minute episodes. \u201cIt renews the whole slapstick genre,\u201d she added, speaking at MIPJUNIOR, an annual gathering for the world entertainment industry. The two men behind the cartoon, Josselin Charier and Antoine Rodelet, said they had been scratching their heads for years to come up with a duo to match \u201cTom and Jerry\u201c, \u201cRoad Runner\u201d and the Looney Tunes greats. They finally hit upon Grizzy and the lemmings after watching a 1958 Walt Disney documentary \u201cWhite Wilderness\u201c, in which lemmings were shot jumping off a cliff. \u201cWe watched them jumping one after the other and thought, \u2018Wow, what totally stupid animals. How cool!\u2019 \u201cWe learned afterwards it was actually the producers who were pushing them off. Yeah, damn producers,\u201d he joked. Rodelet said the show was character driven with the jokes spinning off the weaknesses of the bear and the lemmings, who \u201chave only one collective brain between them.\u201d \u201cWe tried to create really dense episodes for today\u2019s short attention spans with the rhythm mounting to a climax. In \u2018The Road Runner\u2019 it was often just a string of gags,\u201d he told AFP. He said he and Charier \u2013 who began working together in their garage a decade ago \u2013 had spent three years on the show, with 100 people between Paris and at Hari\u2019s studio in the French animation capital of Angouleme pitching in. Hari\u2019s head of sales Adeline Tormo said there was a real clamour for the show. \u201cPeople want to see more and more episodes. Channels are fighting to have it.\u201d –AFP<\/p>\n