Our Story
Bonne Animation is a young Dutch animation studio built around artists shaped at CalArts, one of the world’s most influential animation schools. Our international team brings experience from Beavis and Butt-Head, Warner Bros.’ Batwheels, Walt Disney Imagineering and thatgamecompany’s collaboration with musician AURORA (and many more!)
As AI becomes increasingly present, we have chosen a path that is visibly human, punk in spirit and uncompromising in its love for craft. Fed up with an industry increasingly eager to automate creativity,
Our Team brought together artists from Tokyo, India, Munich, Wales, Los Angeles and Amsterdam to found Bonne: a studio built by hands that adore the medium, bringing our international experience and vast networks to the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has no shortage of talent or creativity, yet remains a relatively small player on the international animation stage. In our experience, Dutch entertainment remains a privileged space, shaped predominantly by white perspectives. We want to firmly anchor the Netherlands in the global animation conversation while representing the country as it actually is: broadening who gets to create, whose stories are told and what Dutch culture looks like on screen.
We are Bonne Animation
The Story of 'Bonne'
Bonne Animation is named after Mary Cremers van Seumeren and her father Frans van Seumeren Sr. to their loved ones, simply “Bonne” and “Bonpapa.”
Bonpapa was a merchant from Utrecht and a builder in the broadest sense: of businesses, of community, of responsibility. He supported the people around him in real, practical and often financial ways, long before society made room for that kind of care.
And then the war came.
In the Netherlands of the 1940s, Frans was arrested. In those years he made a promise if his family and employees were spared, he would donate a set of bells to the Majella church in Utrecht.Craft and creativity in the Van Seumeren home became a lifeline.
Frans got to work on the bells, while Mary and her siblings made music, performances, poems, drawings, handmade films. When the world outside went dark, they made their own light inside. Everything centered around making. Anything that could ward fear into joy. This 4 year long period led to a creative collective with their own secret publication; ’t Schoffeltje, a self-made family paper filled with stories, sketches, jokes, and inventions. A living archive of imagination, still kept alive within the family today.
After the war, Frans kept his word and those bells still ring out in Utrecht as a reminder of community and protection. The heart of the Bonne legacy, however, lives closer to home than any bell tower. Mary carried the “Bon” spirit forward. Bonpapa to Bonne Mama and soon simply 'Bonne'. A name that became a creative force and a philosophy to her loved ones. Bonne encouraged the people around her to make things for the love of making. Not as product, but as connection. Bonne grew up with art as proof of life. A way of keeping the world human. That’s the parallel we carry into our studio now, in an era of shortcuts and fast media: We advocate for the hand made process and always strive to maintain the love of creating.
Because like Bonne, we believe, even in the darkest of times, art is meant to be a proof of life.
We named our studio after her to continue that lineage and to keep that ethos alive.
