Enabling Candy Castle Animation’s vision of inclusive content for children

Marcus Phoenix is a creative force for good. With over nine years of experience in animation production, he has a thorough understanding of how the content children consume can influence the early stages of their developmental growth. This is why he founded Candy Castle Animation in 2021, after previously working as a freelance creative.

Candy Castle Animations’ mission is to produce responsible content that is aimed at educating and nurturing the minds of young children. They are committed to creating content that is both inclusive and representative of all cultures. Since 2021, Candy Castle has grown to a team of nine members who help businesses and other studios to develop content with strong ethics. They do this by working alongside BAFTA and Emmy award-winning writers, producers, and studios.

Marcus and the team at Candy Castle say that as an industry, the UK’s animation market for children is the second biggest in the world, coming in after America. So, it’s surprising that 83% of the UK’s media content for children is brought in from other areas of the world, most of which Marcus says is commercial and is not necessarily nurture focused.

As the owner of a start-up business, one important barrier Marcus had to overcome was to obtain accessible legal support. Having worked with other law firms in the past, Marcus was often left feeling like an afterthought and that his business was misunderstood by his previous solicitors. He said:

As a small business, we were not afforded the same priority as the firm’s much larger clients. I found myself having to chase work for months at a time and our business felt misunderstood. From the start, the solicitors at Harper James took the time to understand our business and what it was we needed help with.

As a client on our Enterprise subscription plan, Candy Castle Animations benefit from one hour of free legal advice per month with access to discounted hourly rates for our full range of legal services.

When asked about why he chose to work with Harper James, Marcus commented:

The main thing that stood out to me was the Enterprise subscription. As a start-up, acquiring quality legal advice can be expensive and costs can rack up quickly. The annual subscription we have with Harper James makes it easier for us to access high-quality support at an affordable cost from lawyers who understand us and have a deep interest in our business.

One of the many hurdles production companies like Candy Castle face is obtaining the funding needed to produce projects. With few opportunities for public or government funding, they turn to private shareholders for investment.

Marcus says our support has played a key role in helping them through this process as our corporate and commercial teams were on-hand to produce bespoke shareholder agreements and articles of association, as well as commercial contracts.

Although Candy Castle Animations are a small business, they have ambitious goals and are just getting started – their vision is to change the UK’s animation sector so it is less reliant on non-domestic content. And, their own future plans include producing content for international screens, contributing to the expansion of the UK’s creative job market, while staying true to their ethos of producing responsible content for children.