Cartoons With Heart ... and a Little Mandarin (Published 2007) (2024)

BURBANK, Calif.

HERE in the animation capital of the nation, computer artists dressed in Cali-casual are ensconced in a converted warehouse that could rightly be called the House That Slime Built: Nickelodeon Studios, a hothouse of toon talent. Walk through the lobby, past the basketball court-theater, past the gratis cappuccino bar, and soon enough a visitor comes upon an area where the walls are awash in apricot, sunny yellow and fuchsia. Lines of tasseled red lanterns hang overhead, the lighting is subdued, and, in a corner office, stands Karen Chao.

She’s the creator of “Ni Hao, Kai-lan!,” an animated series for preschoolers based on her memories of growing up in a bicultural household with two overachieving brothers, a doting immigrant grandfather and a father with one foot in the Old World and one in the New. Ms. Chao and her mother, Hai-lan (Helen), were outnumbered but unbowed, honoring some gender traditions that dated to Confucian times while questioning others. “Ni hao” means “Hi” in mandarin, and Kai-lan is the Chinese name Ms. Chao was given at birth, later Anglicized to Karen.

The series, which will make its debut on Nick Jr. in August, has been nurtured from what was a wisp of an idea four years ago, in experimental shorts called “Downward Doghouse,” then later into a series with Asian-influenced characters, settings and situations. Conceived here in Southern California but animated and partly designed in Taipei and Shanghai, the 20-episode project is Nickelodeon’s big-ticket domestic and international television release for 2007.

What’s remarkable is that this highly personal, highly stylized, faintly feminist project has sprung from an artist whose previous experience in television was limited to watching it. What Ms. Chao, 29, has lacked in experience, though, she has made up for in fortitude. “My dad instilled in me at the age of 7 that as long as you put your whole heart into a project, the outcome will be magnificent,” Ms. Chao said.

Her father, Jack, fled the People’s Republic of China in 1962 with a single Hong Kong dollar in his pocket. He immigrated to New York in 1970, taking work as a delivery boy, and eventually moved to Texas. He is now a multimillionaire seafood distributor in Orange County, Calif., who is so protective of his daughter that he once ran background checks on a suitor she brought home to meet the folks.

Ms. Chao, who earned a degree in digital art from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000, didn’t quite follow the path her father preferred. “He set me up for an internship at PaineWebber, but I doodled on the cold-call sheets and taped the phone receiver down,” she said. “I wasn’t a very good worker bee, but Dad was ecstatic because I was wearing business outfits with shoulder pads and big pants. In Chinese culture criticism is love. So my dad must really, really love me, because he has a lot to say.”

In 2001 Ms. Chao, then working as a graphic artist, took an advanced course in Adobe Illustrator software. “The first thing I drew was Kai-lan,” she said, a version of herself at 5. After Ms. Chao created a Web site with a handful of other characters, her work was noticed by Mary Harrington, Nickelodeon’s top animation executive from 1992 to 1997, who had developed “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Rugrats.”

“I loved her artwork,” said Ms. Harrington, now the executive producer of Ms. Chao’s show. “There was no real story there, but there was a sensibility and heart. We connected creatively and decided to take the plunge. I tease her that when we go out on the streets, people think she’s my adopted Chinese daughter.”

Though Ms. Chao was signed to a development deal, she said that her parents refused to believe she could support herself in the cartoon business. “My dad said, ‘What are you doing there all day at Nickelodeon?’ ” she recalled. “To him it was mind-boggling. I was goofing off and drawing pictures all day.”

Mr. Chao proposed that he and his wife meet Ms. Harrington over lunch. Ms. Harrington politely obliged. “I never had someone ask me to go to lunch with their parents in my business life, but I was honored,” she said. By the time dessert was served, Jack Chao had bestowed his daughter’s boss with the Chinese nickname ”May-me,” which means “pretty woman.”

As a child in Texas, Ms. Chao collected bootleg tapes of Japanese anime dubbed in Chinese. She also was mad for Hello Kitty, whose graphic style has rubbed off on the “Ni Hao” characters. “Everything I draw is childish,” Ms. Chao said. Ms. Harrington confirmed dryly, “Yes, preschool was the prime of her life.”

Kai-lan inhabits a fantastical realm with an impulsive tiger, a koala who longs to be a panda, a pink rhino and a dumpling-loving monkey. Kai-lan is “a born leader who makes affirmative connections with people and nature, paying attention to the feelings of others,” said a consultant for the series, Dr. Janxin Leu, a cultural psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies the dynamics of Chinese-American families. She is part of an advisory team of educational researchers and social scientists that helped develop curriculum goals for a show that builds on the interactivity of “Blue’s Clues” and the bilingualism of “Dora the Explorer.”

Aspects of Ms. Chao’s father and her grandfather, Wensang Chao, are blended into the character Yeye, a frolicsome patriarch who encourages Kai-lan to discover why things happen. The Kai-lan-Yeye relationship is at the core of fanciful stories meant to help young viewers understand the link between feelings and actions. “Every episode has Kai-lan promoting respect for elders and the importance of family,” Ms. Harrington said.

In the premiere episode Kai-lan and Rintoo, the temperamental tiger, provide a lesson in the roots and ramifications of anger. The best friends enter a dragon boat festival, only to lose in the first race. Rintoo, agitated, says: “I don’t want to race anymore. We lost and it’s not fair.” He then whacks the boat with his tail, and it lands atop a pagoda. He stomps off and the narrative pauses to allow Kai-lan to think out loud.

“The series is about cause and effect, how feelings and behaviors are interconnected, and what language we can use to talk about feelings to bring them under control,” said Dr. Laura G. Brown, another of the show’s consultants. Later in the episode, Kai-lan teaches viewers to say “jump” in Mandarin, China’s official language.

Vocabulary words will be a regular feature, which may be the right idea at the right time, as interest in the study of Mandarin increases in the United States. An estimated 50,000 American children are being taught Mandarin in public schools, with an additional 50,000 studying in private settings. Next month the first 2,000 high school students will take the College Board’s new Advanced Placement exam in Mandarin. The number is small but an indication of big things to come, said Tom Matts, director of the board’s World Languages Initiative. “We expect to see growth in this course unlike any other introduced in the last decade or so.”

By comparison, said Marty Abbott, director of education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language in Washington, 300 million Chinese are learning English, including every schoolchild 7 or older. “All indications are that we are not getting our children prepared for the global economy,” Ms. Abbott said. “But we get a lot of calls from parents of preschoolers and elementary school students asking how they can help establish language programs in their schools. They’ve seen how engaged their children are with Dora. There’s a natural curiosity and openness to language at that age.”

Since 2000 Viacom, Nickelodeon’s parent company, has had channels in South China’s economically booming Pearl River Delta. MTV and Nickelodeon are available there, despite China’s strict policies controlling foreign media. “Ni Hao” eventually will be seen in Asia, Australia, Latin America and Europe.

Ms. Chao said she wanted Kai-lan “to be a Chinese-American role model, to be independent, to have a voice, to take the initiative and to not always have to follow others.” Ms. Harrington, the executive producer, said she hoped the series would have a special resonance for the estimated 60,000 girls in the United States who have been adopted from Chinese orphanages.

One such child is Jade-Lianna Peters, who voices the title character. Abandoned at a shrine in infancy, she was taken to an orphanage and put up for adoption at 8 months old. John and Kathleen Peters, a childless couple from Milwaukee, flew to China holding a photograph of her the size of a postage stamp. “When they placed her in my arms, she stared at me for about five minutes, and I stared back,” Mrs. Peters said. “Then, all of a sudden, she let out this big sigh, as if she were saying, ‘If this is what I’m stuck with, it will at least be interesting.’ ”

Now 10, Jade-Lianna, who is being tutored in Mandarin, reads lines from a studio in suburban Milwaukee, linked by high-speed cable to the Nickelodeon center in Burbank, her sandpapery voice adding nuance and energy to a story about a backyard safari.

Listening in from California, Ms. Chao is thrilled by Jade-Lianna’s interpretation of Kai-lan’s exuberance and affection for Yeye. “In Chinese culture everything is expressed in terms of the heart,” Ms. Chao says. “When a child is happy, she is said to have an open heart. When sad, her heart has been hurt. My father often speaks of this. He says being part of a family means having one heart.”

“Whenever I go home, that’s when I feel the safest.” She says. “That’s the soul of ‘Ni Hao, Kai-lan!’ ”