Objective

Child welfare is often associated with negative things, rather than a joyful and carefree childhood, despite being related to welfare work. The goal of the Monni initiative is to humanise the child welfare process and prevent children from being moved from one institution to another like on a conveyor belt. The animation challenge was to show how dark the child welfare process can appear to young people and how MONNI can light the path.

Implementation

For the illustrations, we created a fairytale-like and decidedly rough visual style. The black and white bleakness changes to bright MONNI colours as the faceless institutions transform into cheerful professionals.

In character design, we aimed for relatability, thus the human characters do not clearly represent any gender. The main character is a reserved young person, while the project is represented as a supernatural superhero Monni. Cartoon animation allows for a combination of realism and fantasy, and the playful animation summarises the project’s goals within a small story.