Filipino-American collaborators Bobby Pontillas and Bernard Badion won Annecy’s prestigious Animation du Monde award this year for their sizzle reel that provides an intriguing taste of their intentions for their original animated series, Sun Chasers. Working in collaboration with Manila-based Toon City Animation, Sun Chasers is a passion project steeped in Filipino lore, mythology, and design. After spending their careers bringing to life the stories of other cultures, this project represents not only their most independent endeavor to date but also their most personal.

Many in animation will recognize Pontillas’ name from his 16 years in the industry as a renowned character designer for Blue Sky Studios, Walt Disney, Nickelodeon, Netflix, and for his Academy Award nomination for co-directing the animated short One Small Step in 2018.

Badion came to Hollywood with his aspirations in comedy writing and a master’s degree in writing from Loyola Marymount University. There, he was mentored by Gloria Calderón Kellett, who hired him as a writer’s production assistant on her revival of One Day at a Time. He then worked for Sanjay Shah on Fresh Off the Boat, which transitioned into writing for animation on Transformers: Earthspark.

While both were part of the small but robust community of Filipino talent in Los Angeles, they didn’t actually connect until Pontillas—who tells Cartoon Brew he had a bit of an epiphany in the wake of his Oscar nomination—asked himself, “What do I have to offer storytelling-wise to the industry?”

Wanting to create more stories based in his own culture, Pontillas pivoted his career away from animation design to become a creator championing Filipino stories. He was in development at Disney when he was introduced to Badion as a writer, and they sat down to work on an idea they called “almost like a distant cousin” of their current work on Sun Chasers.

Pontillas says they were brought together onto that project because, “It was a nice and cozy Filipino family, and the executives were stoked by that. But we’re big fans of supernatural stuff as well because that is where a lot of Filipino stories come from: ghosts, goblins, monsters, and spirits — everything that’s really scary. It’s the stories that our uncles and aunties told us growing up that scared us.

“So we’re like, we’re not doing Filipino culture justice if we don’t incorporate that into the story,” he continues. “We took it from this place of just family comedy and injected all of this supernatural stuff with the creatures and the monsters. We ran with that idea because we might as well go all out. We’re at Disney and put our best foot forward to represent our culture, and we did that.”

“They didn’t like that,” Badion laughs. “Bobby was into it. Everyone else, not. And so it disappeared. Bobby went back into the family idea, but that whole thing fizzled away. Then Bobby hits me up at the end of the pandemic and says, ‘I’ve been thinking about the supernatural thing that no one liked. Are you still thinking about that?’ And I was like, ‘Dude, I’ve been waiting for you to email me.’ I got it to a point where it’s nothing like what we had. It’s like Avatar meets The Office. And we talked about it and he was like, ‘Just go crazy on this idea and whatever it is, let’s work on it.’”

They continued development over Zoom and through intense brainstorming and writing bursts at each other’s homes until it was ready to pitch toward the end of 2024. However, instead of doing the traditional pitch rounds, Pontillas says he decided to try Mipcom, the annual television industry marketplace trade show held in Cannes, France.

“The way that Mipcom and any kind of ordeal like that works is that you have to schedule your meetings beforehand to even get into the room. But I didn’t do that because I’m an animation dumb-dumb, and I didn’t know that I had to do any of that kind of stuff,” Pontillas self-deprecates. “So, I didn’t get any meetings. I was just trying to pitch it on the floor internationally at our Philippines Expo booth.”

Pontillas says that’s where he met Miguel del Rosario, the CEO of Toon City. “I was like, ‘Why not just pitch it to him? Why am I trying to pitch it to people that don’t care about it at this point, early development?’ And we found out that we had the same dream of telling Filipino stories, made by Filipinos.

“But also, the Philippines is mostly a service studio country,” he says of the animation work for television and film that is done for major studios through Toon City. “[Miguel] wanted to expand outside of that. He knows that service studio work is always going to be the backbone, but he wanted to expand beyond that because he wanted to highlight young artistic voices in the Philippines, and that’s exactly what I want to do.”

Pontillas says he did his full Sun Chasers pitch at the Mipcom booth and then went to Manila to pitch the whole team at Toon City, who responded enthusiastically.

“I went back to the U.S. and lived my L.A. life, hustling again and trying to make ends meet in the industry until I was like, ‘Miguel, what if I just moved to the Philippines and worked on this?’” he says. “At that time, we were aiming specifically for Annecy. We saw that Annecy was going to happen in June, so we knew the deadlines, and we had a goal: Let’s make a trailer for Annecy because they have those MIFA pitches. Let’s go!”

In mid-January 2025, Pontillas was Manila-bound and worked with the Toon City animators, who committed to Sun Chasers as their own passion project. “I highlighted the Filipino story and said we need you guys to lend credibility and authenticity to it. We obviously had to pay out of pocket, but the crew, the team, and everybody else were so on board.”

During production, Badion says he was able to visit the team for a week, and he says the animators were integral to making the Sun Chasers sizzle even more than they imagined. “We didn’t want to just sprinkle Filipino culture into a show,” he stresses. “We wanted to build from it, and literally, Bobby got to do that firsthand with the animators, which was incredible. They’re in the culture of the Philippines, so they had so much input in the way things look, the way things feel, and the color of things. It was eye-opening.”

Pontillas concurs, saying he and Bernard are very American. “So, when we were coming to them with this story, I always told them, ‘Listen, I grew up in the United States. We’re making a Filipino story. Please be forward with what you feel is authentic in terms of the environments and the tone,’” he says of their brief. “It feeds our soul to try to get in touch with our Filipino side, whether we’ve been to the Philippines or not. And that was our way of doing it, working with this team.”

Sun Chasers eventually made its deadline and the MIFA cut. “When we found out we made it into Annecy, I read the email and I was jumping around in the room over here,” Pontillas remembers with joy.

“If it didn’t happen, we would have found a second plan. But because it happened, it meant so much for me and Bernard as creators,” he continues. “But it meant so much for the country. I can’t explain to you—when we went public, that we’re going to Annecy for an original Filipino animation idea, to go onto a global stage like that? That’s exactly what we want to do: to inspire young artists here in the Philippines, so that they don’t have to always be a service studio mentality. You can see someone like Bernard and me create an original IP and go onto the global stage. If we could do that and show them that it’s possible, I think that kind of ripple in the years to come is that they don’t have to be stuck in one mentality.”

Of course, ultimately winning the Animation du Monde made a huge impact on Toon City’s continued investment in Sun Chasers. Pontillas says, “I think that did wonders for Miguel’s confidence with a global audience, not just the Philippines, right? Thank goodness we walked away with something because we pitched our hearts out and we made this, and we’ve been working on this for years.”

As for what’s next, Badion says that in June, they got the call from Toon City that they had been hoping for. “The prize of the Animation du Monde is that we’re invited back next year, and everyone comes back with updates. Miguel was basically like, ‘We can’t go back there with an update. We already animated this whole thing. We’ve got to go back there, guns blazing with, at the minimum, a pilot.’ I mean, that’s a big thing for him to say because that’s a big investment of time and resources,” Badion underscores. “So, we’re still kind of figuring out what it all means and how we do this, but that’s what’s going to happen next.”

“I think it just legitimized our whole show,” Badion continues. “I can’t say how much Annecy christened everything: Toon City, me and Bobby as creators, and the show. Everything post-Annecy is way easier to get meetings, so we’re going to do everything we can to hustle this into a thing. We’re attacking from all sides.”