Cry Babies is one of the three animated series we worked on for Kitoons, a YouTube channel for children. On this project the difficulty was not technical: it was directing actors who are themselves children.
The setting is not the same. An adult actor is doing a job: they know the studio and they know what is expected of them. With a child, none of that is a given. So the session has to stay playful while still producing a real performance.
Attention is managed as much as performance. A child tires faster. They can lose focus, drift, or simply stop wanting to carry on. The length and the pace of the session become essential. Rather than stretching a session that has stopped working, we know when to slow down, change tack, or stop at the right moment.
Putting them at ease before thinking about the take. Some children arrive full of enthusiasm, then close up once they are in front of the mic. The work starts before the recording does: building enough trust for them to forget the studio a little and find their spontaneity again.
A parent in the room can change the dynamic completely. It reassures some children and holds others back. Every session means finding the setting in which the young actor will be most at ease, and so most natural.
What a child brings to the character. All that complexity buys something real: a spontaneity an adult does not reproduce the same way. When the child gets into it, the character immediately gains in naturalness and freshness. And on a cartoon made for children, that authenticity counts every bit as much as technical accuracy.
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