The animation studio quietly building an international footprint from the heart of Scotland
At the Glasgow Film Festival‘s “Made in Glasgow” panel — part of a full day of talks celebrating the city’s screen sector and sponsored by production house Blazing Griffin — Andrew Pearce gave a rare look at how his brand new studio is already operating on the world stage.
Pearce and fellow animation industry veteran Paula Bird have launched Zaratan, a Glasgow-based production company specialising in animation for older audiences. And they haven’t started small. Projects with Netflix, Amazon, and PlayStation. Creative teams spanning the UK, France, Japan, Spain, and Canada. And a growing eye on the Indian market, one of the most significant growth opportunities in global animation right now.
The foundation is Glasgow, twenty-five years of ecosystem building, world-class crew, and institutional knowledge you can’t manufacture overnight. The city’s animation sector has been quietly producing exactly the kind of talent that major productions need. Zaratan is the direct continuation of that lineage.
Perhaps the sharpest part of their strategy is the least obvious: music. Not score. Not soundtrack. Music as a development filter.
Their own analysis kept surfacing the same pattern. Every animated project that dramatically outperformed expectations had one thing in common. Distinctive, memorable music baked in from day one. Pearce is the first to admit it sounds like a truism. But there’s a difference between knowing something and building your entire development process around it.
So that’s what they did. Zaratan actively seeks out properties where music isn’t decorative — where it’s structural to the world itself. The PlayStation project currently in development is exactly that. Not a musical in the singing-and-dancing sense. Something where sound and music are core to the IP’s identity from the ground up.
It’s a small shift in thinking. The commercial implications are anything but.