HOLLYWOOD — While the grips and gaffers who light live-action sets have been packing rental trucks for Georgia, a company that makes cartoons quietly did the opposite this month and signed itself to Hollywood for the next ten years.
Foxglove Animation, a studio of about ninety people that produces series work for streaming platforms, has committed to a decade-long lease on two floors of an office building near Sunset and Vine, expanding from the single floor it has rented since 2019. The move runs against a well-documented tide. This paper reported last week on the below-the-line crews leaving California for states offering richer film incentives, and the exodus is real. Animation, the studio’s founders argue, plays by different rules.
“You can shoot a car chase anywhere there’s a tax credit and a road. You cannot easily move a hundred artists who have built a shorthand with each other over six years,” said Priyanka Sundaram, 44, who co-founded Foxglove after a long stretch at a larger studio. “Our production doesn’t need a location. It needs people in a room, or at least on the same clock. The room might as well be here.”
Animation’s economics differ from live action in ways that blunt the pull of out-of-state incentives. The work is not tied to physical locations, so there is no soundstage to chase; much of it can be done remotely, which means the studios that keep a physical home do so by choice rather than necessity. Sundaram said Foxglove keeps one deliberately, having found that its junior artists learn faster sitting near senior ones than they do over video calls, a lesson she said the fully remote years taught expensively.
The lease is not pure sentiment. Sundaram was candid that the studio negotiated hard on rate, taking advantage of an office market softened by the same production slump hollowing out other corners of the industry. A commercial broker familiar with the corridor said office space in the area has grown cheaper and landlords more flexible, and that a tenant willing to sign a long term can extract terms that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In that sense, Foxglove’s optimism and the industry’s trouble are the same fact seen from two sides.
Not everyone in the building shares the confidence. A visual-effects vendor two floors down, which asked not to be named while it weighs its own lease, said it is watching the animation studio’s bet with interest and no small envy, uncertain whether its slice of the business can make the same case. The distinction, several people noted, is that effects work follows live-action production, and live-action production is precisely what is leaving.
Foxglove takes the second floor over the summer and expects to add perhaps thirty artists as it fills the space. Sundaram said she signed the ten-year term on purpose, wanting a number long enough that people would ask her about it. “If everyone’s leaving, staying is the story,” she said. “I’d rather be the story.”