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Animation broadcasting desolation in the Great White North

Edited by dronon, GreenReaper as of 18:19
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In a sequel to a pair of stories I wrote many years back (good god, I'm old now), we're now seeing things play out in reverse. Childrens' animation on Canadian television is now on life support or effectively dead, thanks to a slew of channels from Corus Entertainment and WildBrain Studios (representing the vast majority) getting the plug pulled as of September 1, as reported by Montréal broadcaster Steven Faguy's blog.

Signing off, for the final time

Corus Entertainment logo (2016-Present)
Corus Entertainment's channels (announced this summer) slated for closure as of September 1:

Corus Entertainment started off as the cable-network division of Shaw Communications, before being spun off into its own company and having nearly all of Shaw's cable and broadcast television/radio stations transferred to it so they can focus on their cable systems and satellite television division, which has since been bought by Rogers Communications (a recurring theme you're going to see in this article).

WildBrain's channels slated for closure as of September 1:
Wildbrain logo

Wildbrain (formerly DHX, basically a giant mega-zord of mostly DiC Entertainment and CINAR/Cookie Jar Group and others) announced they're shutting down all their channels, exiting the cable channel industry and reverting to being an animation studio only.

How did it come to this?

I can almost understand Corus' closures, since the company is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy after a series of cable television deals and mergers either went south for them or negatively-affected them despite not being directly involved (such as the Warner Bros.-Discovery merger and their later deal with Rogers Communications for cable channels). People having less money to spend on cable television, often choosing to cut the cord and go broadcast-and-internet-only, just made their situation over the past six years worse. Though, without a suitor to buy the badly-indebted company, I can see Corus filing for bankruptcy in the near future.

However, from what I've been able to determine, the Corus and WildBrain closures are related. Corus and WildBrain filed a complaint with Canada's broadcast regulator (the CRTC), stating Canada's two largest Telecom-and-Cable-Network companies, Bell Media, and Rogers Communications. Corus claimed Bell and Rogers was putting them and WildBrain at an unfair advantage via promoting Disney+ and almost ignoring Corus' Disney channels and pretending WildBrain basically didn't exist, but the CRTC could not determine if this was true.

After this, Bell Media announced they were not renewing their agreement to carry WildBrain's channels, cutting them off from about 55% of their potential audience. Rogers then said they were not renewing WildBrain's channels either and that they were shutting down all of their "linear" cable television channels. This removed another 30 to 35% of WildBrain's potential audience. With an 85-90% loss of customers, the company had little choice but to throw in the towel after getting caught in the crossfire between the three larger broadcasters.

As if to run salt into an already gaping wound, the day after Corus announced it was closing Nickelodeon Canada, Paramount (the owners of Nickelodeon) announced they were pulling their content such as Nicktoons and Nickelodeon's "kidcoms" from YTV, and its Nick Jr. content from Treehouse TV (which is unaffected by the channel shutdowns). Paramount is redirecting people to susbcribing to Paramount+ to fill in those prorgamming gaps, as that content remains available to Canadian viewers on paramountplus.ca.

The closure of Family (formerly The Family Channel) is just gut-wrenching, though… with one of the original family-oriented cable networks in Canada being shut down. It was effectively our locally-owned version of The Disney Channel, from how it aired almost exclusively Disney content from its 1988 launch until around 2015. It's like seeing an older but still-beautiful building be prepared for demolition by having a load-bearing column taken out.

If this were an autopsy, the causes of death would be primarily from budget issues, with corporate disputes as a contributing factor.

Th-th-th-that's all, folks!

So Canada's animation landscape will be reduced to just:

That lineup honestly looks a lot like how things were in 2007 or so! If you as a viewer want more, you'll need an internet connection and subscrptions to the following:

Yes, I know… Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube exist, and yeah, they're alright, but they don't offer as much in the way of quality as those three above… plus YouTube has so much brainrot for the kids that I can't fairly recommend it to those that don't know what they're looking for.

But wait… there's MORE!

Nelvana logo (2016-Present)

As I was writing this up, the largest and oldest animation firm in Canada, Nelvana, is reported by employees to have quietly but suddenly closed down. 2025 has not been kind to childrens' animation in the Great White North! Nelvana is no slouch, either… they were the largest animation house in Canada for a good long while, until the giant mega-zord-of-animation studios known as DHX became WildBrain in 2019. At time of publication, Nelvana's website remains operational and their X.com feed remains active, complete with announcements two weeks prior to publication of their latest (and possibly last) animated series, Builder Brothers, launching.

Nelvana is storied in their production, with their biggest hits in their 54-year history being 1983's feature-length sci-fi rock-and-roll musical Rock & Rule, the animation segments to the 1993 Jim Henson Company series Dog City, the adult comedy series Clone High and too many others to list.

I honestly feel like the last parts of my childhood have died, guys…

Sources

Comments

Your rating: None Average: 1 (2 votes)

Canada's future is less The Raccoons and Reboot, and more Soylent Green. Animation, film and pretty much all jobs here are declining, euthanasia is expanding to the mentally ill and homeless, because we're not going to be able to feed all these mouths. What's the point of cartoons if no one can afford them anyway?

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well this is why australia is a good place for animation. since bluey, glitch productions even vivziepop open a studio branch in aussie called Spindleroo. and prepare release pilot homestuck. beside in video game, they had good opportunity especially cult and the lamb and hollow knight.

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Canada is unusual in that its animation industry is mainly companies that other people outsource to. There is some animation that Canadians make and sell under their own initiative, but it's usually small potatoes. Not to be overlooked is computer animation for gaming, most notably Ubisoft, but they've been laying off people for the last year.

I get the impression most animators in Canada live a precarious existence, being hired for projects with a limited production run, then being laid off when it's finished, and having to constantly look for new work. There was a recent newspaper article about the animation industry here in the Globe and Mail but it's already behind a paywall.

Way back around 2001 I had a part-time job for a couple of months at Teletoon (later purchased by Corus), a cartoon-based TV station in Canada, although they couldn't score the same selection as their American competitors. It was an odd place to work; I got the impression no one there was dedicated in the long-term, and were all using it as a stepping-stone to anything else. The woman who worked across from me was unfriendly and never spoke to me; her job seemed to be to make sure that every image of all artwork and tv shows that was used in all their marketing and ads had been legally cleared to be used.

Me and another guy were hired to catalog, sort, organize and selectively clear out old documents, mostly industry news magazines and reports. There was one magazine every couple of months would publish a huge chart called "Who Owns What" in the Canadian broadcasting industry. It was a fascinating, messy, chaotic jumble of clumped companies and stations joined with lines and arrows going every which way. There was one weird situation... I forget the details, but it was something like company A owned 30% of company B, who owned 25% of company C, who owned 40% of company A.

One of the upper managers came up to me and asked what a "lexicon" was, which meant that my co-worker must have used the word, and she didn't want to appear ignorant in front of him. Not that she made a good impression on me either by doing that. There was an internal memo with funny anecdotes about office politics - A parent company that partially co-owned the station also owned a porn TV channel, and it was accidently left on in a waiting room somewhere. Or a creepy husband-and-wife couple who were into bondage and kept being creepers on the office, to the point they had to get banned from the building and the police were called on them.

I don't miss working there at all, there was something very... dry and every-person-for-themselves. I remember they didn't send me my T4 tax form, so when I did my taxes I had to include photocopies of all my pay stubs to the government, along with a letter explaining the situation. The one thing I do miss - was the view from the office window. That's actually within walking range of Furnal Equinox, a hidden gem in the city. It's in the business district though, so not sure if the property managers would appreciate fursuits. And then a little ways east is a dog-themed fountain and a curtain mural, although the latter is difficult to get a good photo of, because of the trees in the way.

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About the author

Ringtailed Foxread storiescontact (login required)

a freelance editor & writer and Fox-raccoon hybrid from Windsor, Ontario, Canada, interested in bicycle riding, reading and video games