New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ Skylar Entertainment) - The Girl With Pinhead Parents is an important and timely animation project with an anti-racism message. The public service announcement (PSA) is voiced by musicians
Nelly Furtado, Jully Black, Skye Sweetnam, Hedley's Jacob Hoggard, and LIGHTS; basketball player Chris Bosh; and radio host Jian Ghomeshi. The theme song is Matisyahu's 'One Day.' 'One day this all will change,' he sings. 'Treat people the same / Stop with the violence / Down with the hate.'
Based on the 2005 limited-edition DIY picture book of the same name, the characters include the Pinhead race, the Hockey-stick Hands race, the Flower-eared race, the Licorice Legs race, the Lollipop Hair race, the See-Through Tummy race, the Fluorescent Glow race, the Push Pin race and Safety Pin race, and point up how absurd it is to judge people based on appearances.
The animated PSA, written and created by Toronto music journalist Karen Bliss with animation produced by Halifax's Copernicus Studios, is a viral marketing campaign aimed at reaching children and adults. Racism is a learned behaviour and a topic few will touch. One timid book publisher told Karen her approach is 'a harsh treatment of a sensitive subject,' but it has to be.
After receiving encouragement from teachers and parents who bought the self-published book or attended a reading, and hearing stories of children understanding the message and loving the characters, Karen partnered with noted artist manager, Canadian Idol judge, humanitarian and motivational speaker Farley Flex on No Pinhead Productions. She wrote a brand new story based on the Pinhead concept and they signed a co-production deal with Copernicus Studios and Slaight Music for this animation project with totally new designs.
'Quite frankly, racism disgusts me, but what's more perplexing is just how ridiculous it is to me that people judge people based on what colour their skin is,' says Karen. 'It's just very weird and illogical. We aren't taught to think this way, but racism is everywhere. As I've been working on The Girl with Pinhead Parents, barely a day goes by where I don't hear a racist comment uttered when I am out or see or read something in the news. Just in the last year I've book-marked more than a hundred racist news stories. That's sad.'
The goal of The Girl with Pinhead Parents is to spread the anti-racism message globally via the Internet, and ultimately partner with a like-minded broadcaster or movie production house to turn it into a series or film, so that children can learn from an early age to accept people's differences and embrace this wonderful world of cultures and races.
'Having carved out a career founded mostly on black music, I've seen music and celebrity generate and reduce hate, which is why I continue to use whatever influence I may have to fight these issues,' says Farley, who recalls getting called the N-word for the first time in grade seven after winning a game of British Bulldog at his school. 'My involvement with The Girl With Pinhead Parents is yet another way to bring awareness to a huge problem that's under-addressed by governments, businesses, educators and, most importantly, families.'
'Animation is a powerful visual form for universal communication and we feel getting this important message out there with The Girl with Pinhead Parents will help by adding one more tool for defeating racism,' says Copernicus president Paul Rigg. 'Eradicating it begins with changing the way racist people think so they don't pass their views onto their children. People are not born with racist views; racism is taught. Hate is another form of ignorance, and racism is a legacy ignorance problem.'
