Manchester’s creative sector has landed another name. Kavaleer, the Dublin animation studio behind shows including Dino SOS and Snake News, with clients from CBeebies and S4C to HBO Max, is opening its first ever office outside Ireland in Manchester, creating 20 jobs. As Prolific North reported, the studio has taken space at Campfield, the city’s creative and technology campus.
Work starts straight away
This is not a nameplate office. Production begins in July on a new international preschool animated series, developed with Klipp Fiction in Norway and Epic Storyworlds in Canada, set to launch in 2027. The Manchester base will act as a sister studio to the established Dublin operation, which employs 100 people. Founder and chief executive Andrew Kavanagh said Manchester was the studio’s first choice for UK expansion, pointing to the existing animation skills base, the presence of BBC Children’s and ITV’s kids division at nearby MediaCityUK, and local universities turning out graduates ready for the industry.
A cluster doing its job
That reasoning is the story. Kavaleer did not pick Manchester on price or on a grant. It picked the city because the talent and the customers are already there. MediaCityUK has spent more than a decade pulling broadcasters, production companies and graduates into one place, and a Dublin studio choosing to sit next to them, rather than in London, is a plain measure of how strong that pull has become.
Ireland keeps betting on the North
Kavaleer is also part of a wider run of Irish firms putting money into the North of England, a pattern that has grown as civic and business leaders work to deepen trade links. As Invest Manchester noted, the announcement came as an international trade mission got under way. Twenty jobs will not move the regional numbers. A studio of Kavaleer’s standing choosing Manchester for its first foreign base tells you something more useful about where the creative work now wants to be.
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