Your face is under construction. And you are one of the builders.
LOOKS Kids is the children’s branch of the LOOKS project: an animated television series made first to be watched for fun, and built so that children aged six to ten come out of it knowing more about their own teeth, breathing, habits and faces than most adults do.
Why a series for children, when LOOKS already talks to adults
The main LOOKS film and online series carry the conversation about appearance to an adult audience. But a large part of what the dental world knows cannot wait for adulthood. Jaws and faces are built in childhood. Habits like breathing through the mouth, thumb sucking or sipping sweet drinks all day shape that construction while it is still soft. Orthodontists ask to see a child around the age of seven, and most parents have never heard this. The knowledge exists, and it reaches almost nobody in a form a family would choose to watch.
The idea: THE CREW (working title)
Inside the face of every child works a tiny construction crew. They build that face, day and night, while the child grows. Nobody knows they exist, until Nel, eight years old, loses her first front tooth, looks in the bathroom mirror and sees them. From now on she is the only person who can talk to the crew that is building her, and the crew finally has someone to complain to.
Because here is the joke the whole series runs on: the child is the boss of the site and has no idea. Every ordinary decision upstairs (a juice sipped for three hours, a night of snoring with the mouth open, a helmet left at home, a first visit to the orthodontist) arrives downstairs as an order, a weather front or a disaster. The crew has to deal with it. Nel has to learn that she is giving the orders.
Six episodes to start with
The Leaning Tower
Nel’s front tooth wobbles before the talent show. Downstairs, a tower is leaning and the crew has to bring it down safely while a new one is already sprouting. Losing teeth as demolition day.
The Night Wind
Every night a storm hits the site and nobody can work. The crew’s investigation leads upstairs: Nel sleeps with her mouth open and snores. The nose is the front door, and snoring is something you tell an adult about.
The Architect
Nel is dragged to the orthodontist. The crew comes along, terrified of the inspection, and meets the one person who has the blueprints. First orthodontic check at seven, told as the day the site finally got a plan.
The Copy Machine
A booth at school hands out perfect smiles, and by lunchtime half the class has the same face. The Foreman is offended: he does not copy. Filters, perfection and why character wins, at a child’s scale.
The Sweet Flood
Nel wins a giant bottle of juice and sips it all day to make it last. Downstairs the site floods every twenty minutes. The crew discovers that what matters is not how much, but how often.
Helmet Day
A football match, a helmet left at home, a tower knocked flat. Emergency procedures, a mouthguard and what to do with a knocked-out tooth, in the most energetic episode of the season.
The characters
Nel, 8
Fast, funny, impatient, a gap in her front teeth. She wants to win the school talent show, keep her friends and not go to the orthodontist. She discovers she is running a construction site and has been running it badly.
The Foreman
Old, moustached, has built a hundred faces and has opinions about all of them. Grumpy out of love. Believes every face has its own design and hates copying.
Pip, the apprentice
Tiny, enthusiastic, wrong helmet size, causes half the accidents and solves the other half. The audience’s energy.
Vera, the engineer
Calm, measures everything, dreams of blueprints. She is the one who eventually understands that the orthodontist is the architect the crew always needed.
Recurring troublemakers: the Squatters, a sticky gang that moves into any building left unfinished overnight (plaque, in other words); the Wind, a dry storm that blows in whenever the mouth stays open at night; and the Sweet Flood, which arrives every time a sweet drink is sipped instead of drunk. None of them are evil. They are consequences with faces, which is exactly what a child can understand.
Who it is for: six to ten, designed around the eight-year-old
Between six and twelve children are in mixed dentition: every single one of them is losing teeth. That is a universal, dramatic, slightly scary and very funny event, and no other series owns it. Around the age of seven orthodontists recommend a first check, because the jaw is still growing and some problems can be guided early rather than treated later. Mouth breathing, thumb sucking and sleep habits are still changeable. In other words, six to ten is the only window in which a cartoon can actually change an outcome, not just describe it.
An eight-year-old is also the ideal viewer for this kind of story. She understands cause and effect, loves a world with rules, laughs at chaos and competence in equal measure, and still watches with a parent, which matters, because the parent is the one who books the visit. Below six the subject shrinks to brushing. Above eleven the child is already in braces, on social media, and needs a different product. We therefore build for the eight-year-old without excluding the six-year-old, and we accept that younger siblings and parents will be watching too.
Who is building it
LOOKS Kids is developed by Paweł Lipka, author and producer of the LOOKS project. He worked on the animation of The Garfield Show, an animated series for children broadcast around the world, and on the animated series Włatcy Móch, created visual effects for the feature film Suicide Room and animations for advertising campaigns for national television channels. He also produced the multimedia first-aid campaign Twoje 5 minut for the KGHM Polska Miedź Foundation.
Technical information
Episode length: 11 minutes (television standard).
Season one: 10 episodes plus a pilot.
Technique: stylised 3D animation.
Language versions: 34 languages.
