A cast of animated woodland sprites who speak Te Reo Maori are educating young New Zealanders about te Reo.
A Maori-language only version of the show is scheduled to screen on Maori Television in June.
The show was developed by Cinco Cine’s founder Nicole Hoey and was 10 years in the making. “For a long time I’ve been playing around with creating a children’s show based in nature,” says Hoey. “I was initially inspired by patupaiarehe, the naughty fairies of Maori mythology, and from there the characters just evolved over time. A lot of my friends have trouble with sounding out the Maori vowels, so I thought I’d turn them into characters.”
The five characters’ adventures over the 20-episode series centre around discovering everyday objects from the human world. They then use repetition, comedy and music to work out what the objects are used for, and how the objects’ names are spelled in both English and Maori (for the bilingual version). The animations are all based on original drawings, and Cinco Cine’s head of post-production, Campbell Farquhar, worked together with Hoey to write the show.
“Little kids love the dancing and singing, while slightly older kids enjoy trying to trace the letters along with the characters,” says Hoey. “The show is primarily aimed at children aged two to five, but we wanted to try and hit a range of ages.”
Amie Mills, Children’s and Digital Commissioner at TVNZ says, “When Cinco Cine Productions came to us with Takaro Tribe, we were thrilled to find a home for this fantastic children’s series. The Maori population is young, and growing in Aotearoa and we believe in the importance of fostering biculturalism and bilingualism in the content we make available to our tamariki.”
Hoey, who is Ngati Kahu, has worked in television production for more than 30 years. Her credits include the award-winning children’s show Pukana (now in its 18th year), more than 700 episodes of the educational drama series Korero Mai, and the highly acclaimed dramatisation of Witi Ihimaera’s Nights In the Garden of Spain.
Hoey is passionate about ensuring all children are exposed to Te Reo Maori and is committed to playing a part in establishing this as part of all tamariki identifying te reo as part of their unique New Zealand cultural identity.
“The beauty of our language is that it’s unique to New Zealand. When my son was at school there weren’t really any cartoons that related to Aotearoa. I wanted to create characters that would become part of the identity of children growing up in New Zealand,” says Hoey. “My dream is that every Kiwi kid 20 years from now - whether their background is Chinese, Muslim or Samoan - has the Takaro Tribe as part of their New Zealand identity kit.”