Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. So we’re going to do the hard work for you.
Global Breakouts visits Indonesia this week for the country’s trailblazing animated film Jumbo, which was recently crowned as Southeast Asia’s highest-grossing animated film. The film has also surpassed Frozen 2 and Moana 2 to become the most-watched animated feature in Indonesia of all time. Deadline speaks to Jumbo writer-director Ryan Adriandhy about his directorial debut, as well as Visinema Group’s co-founder Anggia Kharisma and Chief of Staff Mia Angelia Santosa.
Name: Jumbo
Country: Indonesia
Producers: Visinema Group
International sales: Visinema Group
For fans of: Up, Nussa
On a buzzy Asian animation panel at Hong Kong Filmart in March this year, Chinese animated film Nezha 2‘s record-breaking box office success took center stage, with representatives from studio CMC Pictures basking in the success. On the same panel sat Mia Angelia Santosa, Chief of Staff at Indonesia’s Visinema Group — the studio behind Indonesian animated film Jumbo. Santosa showed a trailer of the new film ahead of its release and shared a modest assessment of Indonesia’s animation scene: ‘We only make one animated feature every few years, so we really don’t know if there is a market for Jumbo.’
Fast forward to mid-May, and Jumbo is a sleeping giant, awakened.
The film has recorded the third-highest number of admissions at the Indonesian box office of all time — just behind Avengers: Endgame in top spot and KKN di Desa Penari in second spot. As of yesterday (May 13), Jumbo has raked in $23.7M at the domestic box office, from 9,474,665 admissions since its March 31 release date.
The film is already the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animation of all time, surpassing the record previously held by Malaysia’s Mechamato Movie, which grossed approximately $7.68 million in 2022. Jumbo has also surpassed Frozen 2 and Moana 2 to become the most-watched animated feature in Indonesia of all time.
Distribution rights for key territories such as Mainland China, North America, Western Europe and Australia remain available, with Visinema selling direct.
Jumbo was made with a budget of less than US$3M, and involved the work of over 420 local creatives. What they created was a story about Don, an orphan bullied as “Jumbo” due to his large body. A storybook inherited from his parents, full of drawings and magical stories, leads him to encounter Meri, a fairy seeking his help to reunite her with her family.
The film’s voice cast include Prince Poetiray, Muhammad Adhiyat, Ariel, Graciella Abigail, Yusuf Ozkan and Quinn Salman.
Riding the wave of success of Jumbo, Adriandhy says that he is currently developing both an animation as well as live action project, while Visinema is working on a puppet show “with a very big IP” — although details on this are still under wraps.
Looking back at the inspiration for Jumbo back in 2019, Santosa points to a lack of locally-made content for children and families in Indonesia. “The audience can mainly only access imported films,” she tells Deadline. “We always saw the opportunity there, but we had to convince the whole film industry first, which was the biggest challenge. We know that in Indonesia, creating live-action has always been easier and the turnover is quicker. Horror has also always filled out our cinema screens.”
With that in mind, Santosa wondered how and where animated films would fit into the market. “Why would anyone enter this space? Why would anyone try to create something that the production itself takes half a decade to establish, and it’s also hard to get talent and things like that?” she would ask herself.
“To convey to the industry is not an easy thing, especially when we’re talking about the film, investment and trying to raise funds. It was very hard at the beginning, but we’ve spent almost six years learning about the audience, the appetite of the Indonesian audience, and convincing other filmmakers that we’ve got opportunities here.”
Visinema co-founder Anggia Kharisma adds: “We wanted to tap into these possibilities in children and family content and meet the challenge for our next generation. We knew from the data that we were collecting, only 0.7% content in Indonesia can be consumed properly for kids and family.”
Writer-director Ryan Adriandhy was just wrapping up his postgraduate studies in film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology when Kharisma informed him that Visinema Group was planning to create a new division called Visinema Studios, which would focus on children and family content in Indonesia. He came across the initial concept for Jumbo, which emerged from Visinema’s internal writing room, and soon came onboard as the film’s director.
Adriandhy shares his assessment of the Indonesian animation scene at that point, in 2020 and 2021. “We have a lot of incredible talent in animation, a lot of incredible artists with skills that are actually international standard, but a lot of these studios and talents struggle to create their own original stories and characters, especially when trying to get funding, so they end up usually providing service work for overseas IP and studios,” he says. “But the talent has always been there.
“Before Jumbo was officially greenlit, the three of us [Adriandhy, Kharisma and Santosa] would travel around Java, getting to know these independent studios and their work. We knew that there are all these hidden gems of studios and talents in Indonesia, and – for the lack of a better word – it’s such a waste to just let them provide services for other studios outside Indonesia.”
Kharisma echoes Adriandhy’s assessment: “We believed that it was the time, with the rise of the local IP and the global demand for authentic voices. Indonesia has a rich cultural DNA and gold mine for IP.”
Partnering with Anami Films and Springboard Studio in Indonesia, the Jumbo project managed to get off the ground.
Working on smaller animation titles like 2021’s Nussa (2021) had helped Visinema Studios gain confidence and experience, but Santosa figured that if Indonesia wanted to make a successful animation, it needed to be on the same scale that local audiences were familiar with from imported films from Hollywood. That became the ambition.
Accordingly, Kharisma calls Jumbo a film for everyone: for children as well as the “child within us.” She hopes that Jumbo is the first of many successful Indonesian animations to come, and she does not rule out a sequel. “I believe that Jumbo is proof that when we are actually given the trust and support, we can create competitive work,” she adds.
Reflecting on Jumbo‘s success at the box office, Santosa points out that there was a substantial number of repeat viewers, through the film’s ability to create a memorable family experience at the theaters.
“There’s such a hunger and thirst for family-friendly content that they can go to the mall and cinema to watch it together,” she says. “That’s one of the biggest factors, because we haven’t had that in such a long time, especially when the kids can understand understand the language and the song. The song is easy for them to replicate. That’s always been the big factor.”
“The love for local content in Indonesia is so big, and the love of having a shared experience. Yes, they can always wait for the content to go to a streaming platform, but the experience is not going to be the same.”
With Jumbo blazing the way for Indonesian animation as a successful precedent, Santosa is confident that the country will be able to produce more animated features and that it will give more investors assurance that there is a market and audience for such projects.
“In the sea of fast-produced films, and horror, Anggia and her team have remained unmoved in their goal of creating this and wanting Jumbo to be very successful, even without a major success story to look up to when they first started,” says Santosa. “It was a very hard journey, but I’m glad that we’re at this point where we can ensure that our friends and other producers have something else to look at and tell themselves that we have a chance for making other films, with a success story like Jumbo.
“The main goal has always been to elevate the animation and film industries, and to give our audience a lot more options, whether it’s live action or animation, just a diversity of content that we know our local audiences love,” adds Santosa. “I hope what we’re doing with Jumbo not only creates something for the audience to have a fond memory of, but also to inspire the whole ecosystem and pass the torch as much as we can so that in the next 10 to 20 years, we will see a lot more animation being produced in Indonesia.”
