Shut Down of Tangent Animation

400 People Laid Off

Tangent Animation, a studio in Toronto and Winnipeg, announced on Aug 5 that they were shutting down production on all projects. The unexpected news shocked the industry and the staff there were working on multiple feature film projects for Netflix at the time.

Established in 2014, Tangent had previously produced Netflix’s Next Gen and the Spanish/Canadian co-production Ozzy. The studio’s upcoming project was Netflix’s long-awaited limited series Maya and the Three which will be about a Mesoamerican-inspired warrior princess who embarks on a quest to fulfill an ancient prophecy and save humanity from the vengeful gods of the underworld.

The only thing anyone knows at the moment is that the studio has shut down production and laid off everyone.  It’s heard that up to 400 people worked in Tangents’ two locations.

The studio had built an robust production pipeline using open-source Blender software rather than the standard Autodesk Maya pipeline. Tangent’s sister companies are Tangent Labs, which recently launched the cloud-based cg production pipeline Loupe, and Tangent Interactive. It’s unclear if the latter companies were impacted by the production shutdown.

The shutdown of Tangent happens almost five years to the day when another major Toronto cg studio, Arc Productions, unexpectedly declared bankruptcy and shut down.