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A knight in shining armour, a mythical creature and a medieval court? It all sounds a bit twee for an animated children's series in 2007.
But what if the knight was a feisty 12-year-old girl, the creature was a clumsy dragon and their living quarters were designed by the team who gave us Gollum in Lord of the Rings?
Weta Workshop's first TV series, Jane and the Dragon, premieres in New Zealand on Saturday. It is hoped the early evening timeslot will entice a family audience to what is being heralded as a massive achievement for the Oscar-winning company.
The huge expense involved in making the series - believed to be more than $16 million - is part of the reason why New Zealand is one of the last countries to screen it. The 26 half-hour episodes are a collaboration with established Canadian animation company, Nelvana.
Despite initial concerns Jane might be too gentle and slow-moving for a modern audience, the show has rated well in Australia, Europe, South Africa, Canada and the United States.
"It's just what we hoped for," says Kiwi children's author and illustrator Martin Baynton, who approached Weta nearly four years ago to make the series.
"People have been crying out for old-fashioned drama."
Baynton had sold thousands of his Jane and the Dragon books around the world when he decided it was time to take his characters to the next level. There were too many story ideas jostling around his head to turn them into more books, whereas TV seemed like a great way to develop the Jane world.
Baynton has also worked as a TV screenwriter, script editor and actor but knowing little about the business end of the industry, he put himself on a crash course, travelling twice to the Cannes Film and Television Festival. He then approached Richard Taylor at Weta to make the series.
The timing was perfect as Weta had just started looking for a children's TV project.
"Richard and I both love beautiful, classic storytelling, the sort of storytelling we remember from children's programmes growing up," says Baynton. "There's been a movement towards the fast and furious because kids are channel-hopping and catching the eye candy of the moment. We wanted to try to build a show that won our audience and kept them on board, a half-hour story with all the ebbs and flows of a normal drama."
Weta didn't just commit to the project, they built a new studio specifically for the show. A team of 74 spent three years on the production, under CGI supervisor Trevor Brymer (who'd previously worked on Dark Knight).
Rather than outsource the animation to India or China where large teams of animators can work for cheap, Weta developed technology that would allow them to get more done, faster.
Using the motion capture technology used on Lord of the Rings, Weta came up with a groundbreaking new way to film several actors in motion capture simultaneously.
Within nine months, the bulk of the animation was done, a huge achievement considering it takes the same amount of time to produce one episode of The Simpsons.
"It's like fast-turnaround drama," says Baynton. "It's much quicker than animation and there's much more truth of movement and behaviour. Because you're actors you can't jump off a three-storey wall and survive. Jane isn't a Ninja Turtle. So when she's having a sword fight, you actually feel it's a young girl having a sword fight. It doesn't feel like a Japanese super-master."
The dragon still required animation, as did the facial expressions of the characters, which were manipulated using the kind of controller you'd use to play a video game. The other characters include Smithy, the blacksmith and resident heart-throb; Jester, Jane's friend with a secret crush; Pepper, the royal cook; and the young Prince and Princess who Jane is charged with protecting.
While most TV productions keep the original writer at arm's length, Baynton led the creative team across all departments, including the visuals and writing. Weta analysed Baynton's colour-pencil drawings and recreated his textured aesthetic using CGI, a process he nicknamed Bayntonisation.
"It's a bit like having a child who's going off to school," he says of handing over his baby to others. "It's been wonderful. It's been a very rewarding process whereas I've heard for other writers it can be devastating."
In the first episode, we meet 12-year-old Jane, the only girl in her medieval kingdom given the honour of training to become a knight. She has to prove herself to her parents and peers, who don't altogether approve of her ambitions.
Throughout the series, Jane also proves to be quite the diplomat, always looking out for her friends and volunteering to help others. In an episode called A Dragon's Tail, she goes on a quest to find a cure for the dragon's illness.
They're aspirational themes that Baynton says are relevant today.
"Like my daughter at that age, 12-year-olds have great sense of rightness about the world," says Baynton. "They don't like injustice. Jane represents girls at the age where they're just starting to question things, so these are very personal stories.
"She doesn't go off riding on the dragon, killing goblins. The problems she faces are the things that children face at home and at school. She just happens to have a dragon and a sword."
What: Jane And The Dragon, new locally made animated series
When & where: 5.30pm, Saturdays, TV2.
