Argentina: Punga animation studio Buenos Aires

Branding punks Punga may be going global, but the ambitions of founder Tomi Dieguez began with a childhood desire to see his art on TV. Isobel Roberts talks to the man who likes to talk to the world.

Delving into the world of Gluko & Lennon, the new show from animation and branding studio Punga, makes you feel something like young Alice must have felt when she slipped down that rabbit hole. Its surreal, shape-changing characters – two unlikely friends – roam psychedelic landscapes, encountering bizarre situations and exploring new adventures in 11 minutes of brilliance.

Just like Alice, you won’t be the same afterwards – but only in a good way, we assure you. “The guys at Punga are fucking insane,” agrees the founder of the Buenos Aires-based shop, Tomi Dieguez. Started in 2001, Punga – which means punk in Spanish, “as in little thieves rather than punk music,” explains Dieguez, “like Robin Hood with creativity rather than money” – has carved itself a reputation at home and abroad for its colourful high-quality output. Led by Dieguez and with a strong focus on art direction and creativity, the team’s work for brands like Sony, Coca-Cola and Microsoft stands out from the rest of its Argentinean contemporaries. But it was only through a twist of familial fate that Dieguez’s obsession with drawing began in the first place. “When I was a child there was a show you could send your pictures in to,” he recalls, “and the presenter would display them on his show. I drew him a lion, just so I could see my drawing on the TV – it seemed so magical at the time. I gave it to my mum so she could post it, but it never appeared on the show, and I kept saying to my mum, ‘They didn’t like it!’ It was only years later that she told me the truth, that in fact she hadn’t sent it in because she thought the guy was an asshole. He was an asshole, but it became my obsession to see my drawing on TV and so I was drawing all the time.”

Eager to spread its wings beyond Argentina, Punga set up in Spain and LA with the Buenos Aires production company Landia in November 2009. But as any good creative will tell you, it’s not just the work within commercials that’s important – and in that vein Punga again collaborated with Landia to launch L’orange Gutan, a content-creation company and the driving force behind the Gluko & Lennon show. “Our idea is to create a kind of menu that you can open up to look for the kind of content that you want; animation, features, Andy Fogwill’s (Landia founder and director) first live-action film. We are people with ideas and we want to say things, and it’s an equilibrium that I like to have in my life.”

The pilot of Gluko & Lennon has already proved a hit, not least with us at shots, and Dieguez hopes there’ll be more. But with Punga having signed to London’s Not To Scale for representation in the rest of Europe, Dieguez won’t be resting on his laurels when it comes to commercials either: “I love to work with creative people,” he concludes. “In commercials I look for funny characters doing simple and funny things, that global aspect where it will make sense to you, to me, my mother, my grandma, your aunt – I want to speak to everyone and make some kind of conscience.”