Maryka & Quentin at Passion help us celebrate Halloween at home with spooky prehistoric animation

It's part of a new series of animated short films for 20th Digital Studio and Bite Size Halloween Jr. to support the film industry but also help families celebrate the beloved annual event at home (when Covid-19 stops us from the usual spooky festivities).

It was apparently a story that evolved "quite a lot" before its final father and daughter angle, as Maryka & Quentin explain: "The core idea was about cavemen in a potential far-future, long after our actual society, where humanity has gone back to its primitive roots. There was something appealing about those characters who would be totally clueless of how we lived and would just have some old objects of our era that remained around them. What would they make of it?"

"We also felt that the misinterpretations those cavemen characters could make had strong comic potential," they add. "In these early developments, we'd already designed the characters, Cro and Moot, but their relationship was really different. At first, they were both adults, then teenagers and brothers and sisters, until finally being a father and his adventurous little kid. This felt like the strongest link between them, and there was also something amusing about having this caveman dad who is so wary and uncomfortable with what's out there in the world and his little girl being the exact opposite."

Back to Cave One is one of 30 scary short films for Bite Size Hallowen Jr., which range from horror comedy to psychological thrillers and everything in between. Created by Passion, as well as up-and-coming filmmakers, these films will screen across digital and broadcast platforms Freeform, FX, and Hulu’s Huluween platform hub and YouTube channel.

Formerly Fox Digital Studio, 20th Digital Studio's short film series previously-titled Bite Size Horror, was released during the 2017 Halloween season and aired on broadcast and online. This is the first year that family-friendly animated shorts are included.