To the Drawing Board

Aft

er illusionist Roy Horn was mauled by one of his own performing tigers on a Las Vegas stage last October, grieving fans held vigils outside the hospital where the critically injured showman was admitted, and placed mementos at the foot of a Siegfried & Roy statue on the city's Strip. Sixteen time zones away, in a drab industrial building at the far end of a Hong Kong subway line, the shock was felt just as much. Imagi, a fledgling animation company, was in the running to make Father of the Pride, a prime-time comedy cartoon about the private lives of Siegfried & Roy's feline co-stars. "I opened the newspaper and it said Roy was bitten by a tiger," says Francis Kao, founder of the company. Then calls started coming in from DreamWorks SKG, the Hollywood studio that dreamt up the idea. "I started to get nervous," Kao recalls.

Miraculously, Horn survived, and Father of the Pride debuts in the U.S. in August on NBC, which is awarding it the choice time slot vacated by Frasier. That makes Imagi, with its 300 employees, a small example of the kind of business high-cost Hong Kong needs in a big way: knowledge-based companies that don't require cheap inputs or production costs to compete. (Although the city has a world-famous film industry, Japan and South Korea have long been Asia's animation centers; mainland China and India are also on the rise in this field, capitalizing on their cheap labor pools.) Imagi is also a tale of the younger generation reinventing the family business, a venerable Hong Kong tradition.

The company traces its roots to Boto International, one of the world's largest manufacturers of artificial Christmas trees, which was founded by Kao's father, Michael Kao. The junior Kao joined the firm after graduating from Sacramento State University in California in 1998, and his first job was to produce an animated website for the company. Kao, a longtime fan of cartoons, was fascinated by the animators he met and persuaded his father to set up a cartoon unit. In April 2001, Kao went to a television programming conference in Cannes with six minutes of a cartoon, only half of it done in color, to sell to television networks. No one showed any interest, partly because Kao didn't arrange any meetings before getting on the plane. "We were there with a booth," Kao laughs, "but I was just drinking beer with the animators." Six months later he went back with a full episode, and sold the show, a time-traveling, robots-meet-dinosaurs adventure, to the French television network m6. In 2002, Boto sold off most of its manufacturing operations to an entity held by the Carlyle Group, an American private-equity firm, for $136 million. Boto said its manufacturing operations had peaked and the sale was a good deal for shareholders. Angry minority shareholders said they were being shortchanged and criticized the sale as an effort to benefit insiders. Led by shareholder and Hong Kong stock-market watchdog David Webb, they tried to block the restructuring, but narrowly lost a vote. "Christmas is canceled," Webb lamented. That left Kao's animation unit as the core of the company. "What do these guys know about the animation business?" Webb asked.

At the time, not much. But last year, the renamed Imagi International Holdings landed a contract to animate 13 episodes of Father of the Pride. The company doubled its staff to 300, and Raman Hui, the Hong Kong-born supervising animator of DreamWorks' Shrek and Shrek 2, flew in to oversee the work. According to Hui, DreamWorks considered more experienced companies in France, South Korea and the U.S. but picked Imagi because its employees were plucky and determined to learn. "It's really refreshing," says Hui, one of six DreamWorks employees supervising work in Hong Kong. "They say, 'Tell us how to do it.'"

As well as a great time slot, Father of the Pride has top-name talent—voice-overs will be done by John Goodman, Carl Reiner, and Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it may yet be undermined by Horn's condition. Last month, NBC previewed the show in New York City for advertising executives, playing a video greeting from Horn, his first public appearance since the mauling. The effects of his attack, and a stroke he suffered after it, were apparent, says Kristi Argyilan, media director of the advertising firm Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos. "They were trying to say, 'Look he's O.K.,' and he's not," she says. "He's got a long road ahead of him yet. You've got that hanging over the show." But even if Father of the Pride bombs, Imagi has other projects in the works, including a movie for Japanese toymaker Bandai and a feature film of its own. "For this to work, you have to be wild," Kao tells his staff. "Give me some wild ideas." How about a young man who, weary of making Christmas trees with his dad, thinks show biz might be more fun?