From high school comics to animated series, two people dream of Malaga in Toulouse

Maria de Valderrama

Toulouse (France), September 21 (EFE). – It’s not the ingredients of a recipe, but the heroes of a comic strip of humor and adventure: Onion & Pea (onions and peas, in Spanish) are the protagonists of a teenage dream of José Villena and David Tomaselli of Malaga.

The two meet at the Animation Forum, which runs until Thursday in the French city of Toulouse to turn their book into an animated series.

Filina is a painter and resident in Malaga, while Tomaselli works as an engineer and lives in Zurich (Switzerland), but in their spare time they both try to translate the heroes they created when they were just 14 (now 46) into cartoons, imitating comics they couldn’t Get it out of their heads.

The result was an onion with a large nose and layer, and peas with cups. These two characters are trying to get Leo, the human protagonist of this saga, out of the trouble he’s having with his friends, often because of these vegetables with dreams too big.

“After high school, we kept it in a drawer, but we met again at university and remembered the Onion and Pea Project. We saved it and started developing it professionally,” Villena says in an interview with Efe.

The first comedy was published in 2014, after four years of work, thanks to the Gogomics Guild of America. Now they have three such epic adventures that they’ve been wanting to turn into an animation for a year and a half.

That is why they traveled to the main meeting of the European co-production of the animated series, Cartoon Forum, in search of partners to create their first trailer, an essential part in the development of a project of this kind.

“We are looking for funding, whether producers, televisions or platforms that are interested in participating in the series project in international countries, not just Spain,” Tomaselli says.

Layer vegetables

More than thirty years of amateur adventure have taught them to lose their shame: Velina wears a T-shirt with his heroes painted and gives keychains, hats and mugs to these vegetable superheroes.

On their social networks, Instagram and YouTube, they post pranks with Onion & Pea dolls and show what their world would be like if they ever became a video game or TV hero.

“In 2020, we introduced ourselves to an Iber Series comics call and ‘Onion & Pea’ was selected in its catalog. That was when an animation studio became interested in the project and told us it could work,” notes Villena, who explains the comic as he writes Tomaselli script.

They developed the idea for the series which they submitted to Weird Market, where it was also selected, before submitting it to Next Lab, which they won.

This last award allowed them to give a presentation for their project at the Annecy Animation Festival, where Villena did not hesitate to go up on stage in a flying onion costume.

“Given the positive return that our project has generated, we are encouraged to move on. That is why we now need co-producers or a TV company so we can make the ‘joke’ (puzzle) and submit it to the next animation forum. This year we’ve come to learn, to see how it’s done So, let’s make connections,” Tomaselli says.

After spending a decade self-financing their creations and hiring professionals interested in their history to advise them, they made it clear that Belgian TV was interested in joining the project as a partner.

But the huge budgets required by this kind of creativity will force us to keep looking for allies on television.

“We don’t know anything about this world, we simply ask and they explain to us what’s next. We go step by step,” they say.

In addition to the humor and adventures that “Onion & Pea” promises, their comics aim to educate in values ​​such as friendship, sports, respect for others, and equality. But always out of entertainment and with weird facts, which is a basic requirement in the magical world of cartooning. EFE

mdv / ac / jac

(photo) (video)

EFE 2022. Redistribution and redistribution of all or part of the contents of the EFE Services, without the prior and express consent of Agencia EFE SA, is expressly prohibited.