New kids show Bird’s Eye View is the Ted Lasso of the bird world
Nick Ward has penned for Wellington Paranormal and Outrageous Fortune, but his following Television set sequence is a feelgood young ones exhibit encompassing his two large enjoys: comedy and birds.
Nick Ward enjoys birds. He watches them, he will make clocks for them, and now, he’s writing tv exhibits about them. Ward is the author of Birds Eye Check out, a new animated children’s collection about a flock of native birds who ponder the deep mysteries of human behaviour. If you assume birds are odd, Bird’s Eye Check out is about to flip things about to expose the genuine weirdos of the animal kingdom: us.
Bird’s Eye Check out is a charming, cheery tonic to the planet all over us, and every single quick episode is crammed with bold colours and dry, observational humour. It was an simple conclusion for Ward when directors Pete Circutt and Jared Kahi approached him with the notion. “Comedy, birds, I’m in. That is what I’m all about,” Ward suggests. “It also had that other element to it which we all love, which though it is about birds, it’s all about on the lookout at humans.”
We enjoy the birds in Birds Eye View, but seriously, they are seeing us, hoping to make feeling of the bizarre matters we do each working day. Why are we ruled by a ringing mobile phone? Why do we go to operate for eight hours straight? Why do we select up doggy poo? These are the sorts of inquiries youthful little ones check with to make feeling of the planet all around them, and like us grown-ups, these birds do not normally get the answers suitable.
“The birds become an avatar for the young ones that are seeing,” Ward suggests, introducing that the birds’ a little bit “skew-whiff” observations offers the show a tone that he hopes will appeal to all ages. It also aids that it is voiced by well-recognized Kiwi expertise like Stan Walker and Millen Baird. “I like to consider there’s one thing right here for the young ones, and there’s a little something in this article for the parents seeing as properly. The solutions that are the mistaken answers are so a lot a lot more entertaining.”
Bird’s Eye View is about delighting in the minimal factors, and that is exactly why Ward loves birdwatching. “Birds are a magical point,” he suggests. “Birds do one thing magic that we can not do, which is they can fly unaided, they can acquire to the sky. They tend to come to be a bit of white sound, a chook flying in the sky – it’s just a chook. But just prevent for a minute and assume about the mechanics of that, and the magic of that, and what it must be like to be a bird.”
Ward’s passion for getting joy in the day to day shines via in our Zoom call. I explain to him about the kereru in our garden who entertains us by getting boozed on berries. “Bird of the year? Drunk of the calendar year, far more like!” he suggests. He feels an affinity with the tui (“when they distribute their wings, and they go from being this darkish fowl to multi-colored, I’m heading to say the word again: magic”) and has channelled his love for the cuckoo by producing about 40 cuckoo clocks, offering each and every one a progressively a lot more weird and fantastic way of announcing the time.
Absolutely this avid bird lover has an belief on a bat getting named chicken of the calendar year? “You know what? Regulations are produced to be damaged,” Ward claims. “If we did not consider a small little bit outdoors of the box, individuals would not be building tales about conversing birds. And that’s the detail I like about Bird’s Eye View. It is such a surreal tale notion, and we feel to get away with it extra in our kids’ storytelling and a lot less so in our mainstream stories that we tell in this article in New Zealand.”
From Outrageous Fortune to Wellington Paranormal, Refreshing Eggs to Below the Vines, Barefoot Bandits to Quimbo’s Quest, it’s difficult to discover a modern New Zealand television collection that Ward has not been associated with. Offered his comprehensive working experience in the sector, how does he imagine New Zealand television is positioned in a earth of limitless Netflix binge-watches and consumable swift picks?
“I imagine we can generally be braver. Everyone’s heading to say that, even the commissioners will say that. Then the problem is: can the audiences be braver? You know, what are they prepared for?” he says. “We are a a little additional conservative crowd below in New Zealand, but you know, we force it. I’ve had these a fantastic time functioning on Wellington Paranormal. That’s a exhibit that doesn’t just force the boundaries, it explodes them.”
Ward’s at this time operating on a new HBO science fiction drama, a “crazy-as show” established in South Korea but with scripts by New Zealand writers. Many of his tasks are centered abroad, which tends to make operating on Birds Eye Perspective even more specific. It appears to be there is not a much better time for an unashamedly Kiwi present that wants to drive the boundaries about speaking birds, or a small and sweet television collection that celebrates how exclusive we are.
Birds Eye View is a minor little bit of magic, just when we need it most. “It does not ask you to query your mortality or take you on some massive journey of the soul. It is a kid’s exhibit,” Ward says. “But what it ought to be most of all is anything you can appreciate and be entertained by and love. You know what? It is the Ted Lasso of the bird entire world, that’s what it is.”
The total year of Bird’s Eye View is readily available on TVNZ OnDemand now.
