Hungarian Animation Gives Wiiings - The Story of Red Bull Cartoons from Pécs
Story published in Hungarian edition of Forbes
In Pécs, at the Kastner Kartoon studio, the iconic Red Bull cartoons are being made. We talked about the times before the change of regime, the incomparable Tibor Hernádi, and how neither fountain pens nor jokes are what they used to be. A socialist animation factory’s capitalist success story. - article by Benedek Lits published in Forbes Hungary.
Halfway between the mosque and the Zsolnay Quarter, on the quiet, pleasantly winding Vince Street, it's worth searching for those who want to meet the small team that created the lovable, distorted characters of the Red Bull commercials and then drew their stories frame by frame. In the hidden little office, you’ll find smiling people, piles of paper, and energy drinks awaiting you. On the walls, alongside the iconic characters, the famous advertising slogan is also displayed, in German: Red Bull verleiht Flüüügel!
From Dr. Bubó to Red Bull
"Before the change of regime, we operated as a subsidiary of Pannónia Film Studios on Marx Street," says Erzsébet Takács (Bözsi), the studio's production manager. Bözsi has been creating animations for nearly 45 years; before that, she painted porcelain at the Zsolnay factory. With Pannónia, she worked on the Kérem a következőt! series, which tells the stories of Dr. Bubó, the "Trombi és aTűzmanó" cartoon series, and the full-length animated film A hetedik testvér (The Seventh Brother).
After the privatization of the socialist company, the Pécs-based team came under the direction of Tibor Hernádi, the successful graphic artist and director of Félix, the Cat, who continued the studio under the name Funny Film. His concept eventually won the hearts of Johannes Kastner and his agency, responsible for Red Bull marketing, in 1989: the collaboration could begin.
"I painted the first film in '91; at first, only one film was made at a time. The market wasn’t as big as it is now," Bözsi continues. "When more films were requested, several of us started painting Red Bull."
"We've been working exclusively for Red Bull for more than fifteen years,"
- adds Éva Szilber, the studio's managing director. Éva has been with the company for 27 years and took over the management after Tibor Hernádi's death in 2012. After the Kastner agency took ownership of the project, The Cartoon Garage was established.
Over the past 12 years, the ties between the Pécs-based team and the international agency have grown even closer. On the 35th anniversary of their collaboration with Red Bull, the studio was renamed under the Kastner Group, and today the team works under the name Kastner Kartoon.
However, Tibor's true legacy lies not in the company, but in the style, the characters, and the character designs. These are overseen by Mónika Bulyáki (Monyó), the art director, who also began her career under Hernádi’s guidance during the Pannónia days.
"My debut was with the story where the dachshund falls in love with the Dalmatian. I had to animate a droopy-eared dachshund. I was afraid to show it to Tibor."
"We were sitting in that small, dark room where the motion test took place, and all I could hear from Tibor was him breathing. I was so nervous, wondering what would happen. Then he stood up and kissed the top of my head. That’s when I became an animator."
Monyó has gone through every stage of animation production - from painting, to in-betweening, to key animation, and finally to design. Today, she brings to life the characters that millions around the world associate with Red Bull.
In-betweens? Keyframes?
Creating hand-drawn animation is no simple task. First comes the script, the story. This is created by the Kastner agency in collaboration with Red Bull’s international team and submitted to the studio as a brief. In its format, it resembles a comic book-like storyboard containing the main visual elements and visual jokes. Alongside it comes a German-language voice track and a transcript with translation.
Next, the art director designs the characters - this is called the character sheet. Once Red Bull approves it, the studio develops the storyboard into keyframes, a process referred to as "blocking" or "posing" the animation. Keyframes depict the most important moments of the animation, and their number varies from story to story. Flipping through the keyframes already gives a sense of the story, though it still appears in a rough, choppy animation form with coarse texture.
This is where the in-betweeners come in - they connect the keyframes and complete the animation frame by frame, carefully ensuring that the characters' mouths follow the spoken dialogue sound by sound, based on the provided German voice track. It helps tremendously if the character sheet already includes prepared facial expressions, mouth shapes, and gestures appropriate to the situation.
The in-betweened animation is then outlined frame by frame using a black technical pen, followed by the coloring process. There’s no digital solution that meets the required quality for either the outlining or the coloring, so these steps are still done entirely by hand. Digitalisation only makes things easier in one aspect: static elements - such as body parts that don’t move, as well as the foreground and background - are now drawn on separate layers and then composited together.
"One second of film consists of 12 hand-drawn and painted frames, and creating a fifteen-second animation takes about three months,"
– explains Éva. "We can start projects with a one- to two-week delay between each, and we can handle a maximum of three projects in parallel. And that doesn’t include the time it takes when Red Bull sends something back for revisions."
“We spend a lot of time with our characters,” says Monyó. “It’s almost an intimate relationship. While I’m designing a character, I’m already running the film in my head, trying to identify with it, imagining how I’ll bring it to life, moving it in my mind. You need a kind of inner acting, a way to step into that figure. That’s why it’s such an uncomfortable feeling when we can’t finish a film - the initial freshness starts to fade, and the character is left without a story.”
Back in the Day…
“Client expectations have changed a lot too. Personally, I find it really difficult that we can no longer include those little gags, subtle mistakes, visual jokes in the characters that we used to be able to,” Monyó reflects. “Either they’re copyrighted, or the client feels the target audience won’t appreciate them.”
“There are so many things you can’t joke about anymore that used to be totally fine - and people used to laugh a lot at them. Now the company would get sued,” Éva sums up the situation. “You have to accept that and leave it out. Even though sometimes a visual gag really just begs to be used. But of course, as Hungarians, we often don’t find the same things funny as others do, and vice versa. It depends on the country, and it’s not our place to overrule that.”
"Back in the day, a female character might’ve had certain features - sure - but she also had a huge nose and two giant buck teeth, and still, it made for such a lovable story," Bözsi chimes in, laughing. "Now there’s demand for a Pamela Anderson type - with small breasts."
You can still joke around a little with male characters, but not at all with female ones anymore. As it turns out, even drawing the central “V” cleavage line is no longer fashionable for female characters, and it’s best to avoid décolletage and more noticeable imperfections too.
The characters are being drawn more and more human-like, with body-to-head proportions increasingly resembling real people. Beyond the shape and design of the characters, the studio has also had to shift to a more restrained style of linework, which has significantly altered their original graphic style.
The team is currently working on an adaptation of an old commercial for the UK. The changing spirit of the times is clearly visible in the main character, a cyclist: smaller nose, smaller ears, smaller mouth, shorter neck - and a helmet. That’s the result of ten years of change.
But it’s not just the audience that’s evolving - so are the materials. The decline of analog animation has had a bittersweet effect. Today, even most hand-drawn animation is created on digital surfaces. Bözsi sums up the situation: “Let’s talk about paper: it’s insanely expensive, and the quality is unacceptable. Paint: we worked on a film that wasn’t painted until four months later. I mixed the color at the beginning, got the concept approved, but four months later when I sat down to paint, the result looked nothing like what I had originally mixed. So I had to start over.”
“The quality of dip pens has also gone downhill, and so have mechanical pencils. The ones colleagues received 30 years ago still work today, while the ones I bought two years - or even just a few months - ago already don’t,” complains Éva. “Most of us don’t even use dip pens anymore. We use these refillable fine-liner pens with cartridges - but they’ve got their own problem: they’re never truly black, even if the label says so. When we scan them: they turn out grey. And the ink bleeds into the paper - maybe invisible to the naked eye, but crystal clear when scanned. And this is with us using only top-quality materials.”
The circumstances may change, but the message remains
For all the challenges that come with running a studio of autonomous artists, the Pécs team has had just as many successes. Today, the studio doesn’t just produce Red Bull ads for the German and European markets, but for every corner of the world. Existing ads are redrawn for new markets with characters of different skin tones, and popular football-themed ads are recreated with more national jerseys and current stars. Kastner Kartoon even produces local joke-based animations for East Asian and African audiences.
Due to increasing demand, the longtime 12-person animation team is constantly growing. Currently, 16 people work at the studio, and they are considering launching an internship program.
"The Budapest team at Kastner wants to support the Pécs studio not just with day-to-day operations, but also in its growth and scalability - so the surge in interest doesn’t stop at mere curiosity," says Tóth Andrea, Creative Director of Kastner Budapest. We spoke about the future of the collaboration at the Kastner Kommunity café and coworking space overlooking II. János Pál pápa Square.
"It was the uniqueness that led to the choice of Hungarian animation. You can’t name another brand that has built its television communication with the same style and message for 35 years. That kind of consistency requires a strong foundation - and that’s the team in Pécs."
Andrea speaks about the changes in technique and style with the same matter-of-fact tone as the Pécs team. "The audience is changing—that’s only natural over such a long period of time. More and more different people are seeing Kastner Kartoon ads, and if we want to stay successful globally, we have to keep up with the times."
The less caricatured style, the smaller noses, the more human-like and detailed drawings are what work today. A 15-second video might seem short, but in the world of TikTok, it’s actually standard. And that means the story and visual complexity both need to be strong - more background elements, more subtle movements are required.
Still, the characters inspired by Hernádi are instantly recognizable. From the very first glance, viewers can tell what slogan they’re leading to - and which energy drink they’re promoting.
