Since we last caught up with Reynard in 2023, the University of South Carolina (USC) graduate and founder of Indonesia-based Ploopy Animations has achieved major success. In less than two years, Reynard went from leading a team of ~10 people working on a project-to-project basis to building a company of 12 employees and two interns.
“Back in the day, we were dealing with small-time projects,” he said, noting they mostly worked with returning clients who had projects valued anywhere between $500 and $1,000 USD. That all changed when Ploopy Animations was hired to create an anime for The State Bank of Indonesia — and it went viral. Now, Ploopy produces animated shorts valued at $30,000 to $80,000 USD per project.
Ploopy Animations Goes Viral
The opportunity to work on a project for The State Bank of Indonesia all started with an elevator pitch.
Reynard credits a class with USC Professor Faye Riley for helping prepare him for this moment. Professor Riley took students in her screenwriting class on an actual elevator ride.
“She said a screenplay is not worth anything if you cannot sell it,” Reynard recalled. “It totally paid off.”
Literally.
At the Java Jazz Festival, Reynard had 30 seconds to pitch one of the bank’s division heads.
“It was on the spot,” he remembered. “They said they wanted an anime with a budget of $30-40,000 and asked ‘can you do that?’” The literal elevator-pitch moment resulted in a meeting at The State Bank of Indonesia headquarters the following week and Ploopy Animations was hired for the project.
Reynard and his team knew they had to get the anime right, and started by recruiting experts. They hired an Indonesian script writer who had spent years in Japan and three professional Japanese voice actors. Plus, they drew everything by hand.
Hand-drawn animation in the age of artificial intelligence is not surprising when, as Reynard says, AI cannot genuinely create something new. He calls it the “smartest remix machine,” pointing out that the end product is not great.
At Ploopy, “every movement is drawn by hand. There is no motion graphic. No AI. No CGI,” Reynard emphasized. The video, about four-and-a-half minutes, features more than 50,000 individual layers and frames took a team of employees about six months to create.
Reynard wanted people in Japan to feel it was so accurate, they would not be able to tell that an Indonesian animation studio created it. This also meant having a script that told a simple, relatable story.
The attention to detail paid off. The anime went viral in Indonesia and even internationally, leading to new opportunities — including a personal invitation to Comic Fiesta, the Malaysian equivalent of Comic Con.
At Comic Fiesta, “I had people in Malaysia walking up to me and asking, ‘Did you make this?’” [about The State Bank of Indonesia anime].
“It is not just about statistics on YouTube and Meta, but having real people walk up to you and say they like your work. Technically, my team did it; I just run the company,” he stressed. “It was the largest ego boost for me.”
The success led the bank to hire Ploopy Animations for a second anime episode — for double the budget.
Running an Animation Studio as a Profitable Business
As Reynard said, he no longer does animation himself. “There are much more talented people,” he said with a laugh. “My job is gathering said talented people in one place and building a chemistry of our own.”
“Knowing that these talented people want to work for me, that’s an ego boost in itself,” he added. “So, it is also knowing that my work has value to it, even if I do not do the animation.”
Handling business development, finance, taxes, HR, and more can be exhausting, Reynard admitted. He feels a parental responsibility to his 12 employees. But that pressure is what fuels him.
“I have always been a bit of a hustler,” Reynard said, recalling that in college he would constantly find small jobs to balance out his finances. “The part of the grind that is fun is not completely about the money. It is about money simply because I am a single parent of 12 children who all have mouths to feed,” he joked about his team.
“Imagine building an amusement park that people genuinely love to come to. It is seeing the smiles on people’s faces — that is the magic.”
Beyond their work with The State Bank of Indonesia, Ploopy Animations has done work for an oil and gas company, a Japanese metal stamping company, and a Chinese company that wanted a comic about AI for the edible oil sector, to name just a few projects.
As the leader of the animation studio, Reynard has prioritized one thing above all else: great storytelling.
“What do you want to tell viewers? What is the message? That is the core of the animation,” he said. “We carefully select projects that align with our vision and strengths, so we can deliver the highest-quality story and animation. We also prioritize our clients’ success, because great storytelling isn’t just creative, it’s also an investment. We want to make sure our clients see real value and a meaningful return on that investment.”
“Tell a good story” is one of the four points of Ploopy Animation’s mission. The other three are:
Create quality movable pictures
Raise the standard of animation in Indonesia
Reach a global stage
Facing the Challenges of Entrepreneurship
While Ploopy Animations has achieved incredible successes — receiving headlines on major Indonesian news sites and getting featured multiple times on live news segments — there have, of course, been challenges.
At the beginning of 2024, Ploopy Animations was officially registered as a company. In that first year, they made a profit.
Although he was a Media Arts major at USC, Reynard has leaned on key lessons from other USC classes to effectively run his business, too. He cited a speech class as crucial to his ability to keep his business pitches simple and structured.
As the company’s projects got larger, and with multiple large projects happening at one time, Ploopy Animations had to scale up or outsource.
“The problem is our product is very tailor-made. So, we cannot just outsource,” explained Reynard. “We had to scale up.”
That rapid development meant moving from a cramped space in the top of Reynard’s garage to an office in a three-story building. The move was necessary, but came with challenges like new costs, delayed project starts, and renovations to what Reynard called the “slightly dilapidated” office space.
“Hustle is my motivation,” Reynard continued. “I have always liked spending cash, but I never liked asking for money. So, I automatically start asking, ‘How am I going to get it?’”
When it comes to choosing projects, that means balancing larger projects that may offer more visibility with smaller animation projects that come with larger profit margins.
“Building is not the challenge,” he said. “Figuring out what the client wants is what is most expensive.”
A Small Studio with Pixar-Level Ambitions
Reynard maintains friendships with numerous University of South Carolina alumni and is paying his education forward as a lecturer at the University of Indonesia. There, he is building a curriculum from the ground up and teaching animation.
He was also invited to become a moderator for @America, a show that strives to build a deeper connection between Indonesian and American cultures.
Reynard’s top advice for other students is networking. “Get out there, meet people,” he said, stressing that “you never know who is going to be the next Bill Gates.”
While at USC, Reynard even took a golf class as an elective — as a way to meet people. He was the only art major there.
“You are not going to get where you want to go alone. Tag along with someone else and their success becomes your success, too,” he said.
As for what is next for Ploopy Animations, Reynard cites Pixar as his model. Pixar started as a small tech company, a pioneer in CGI. Their work on advertisements for other companies paid for their research and development, allowing them to start making their own movies.
“That is what we are doing,” he said. “We are doing a Pixar.”
Ploopy Animations may not yet have a way to finance their own movies or TV series, but with big plans — and more viral anime shorts — they’re well on their way.
