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The Happy Makers

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The Happy Makers is a Toronto-based creative studio founded by illustrator and storyboard artist Dimitri Kostic and animation picture editor and writer Annellie Samuel.

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We are a husband-and-wife creative team who have spent more than three decades in children’s animation between us, developing stories from storyboard and animatic through to the finished screen. Dimitri brings an illustrator’s eye for character, performance and visual storytelling. Annellie brings an editor’s instinct for story structure, pacing and emotional clarity.

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We are not new to working together. For about ten years we have shared studio crews, including Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, The Magic School Bus Rides Again and Lucas the Spider, and run our own projects alongside them: ten animated nursery rhyme videos we directed and designed for BGM in the UK, and our story It’s an Ant’s Life for Let’s Go!: A Kids Comics Studio Anthology.

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We live and work together, and ideas move from conversation to sketchbook to finished page without leaving the house. That shared way of working is at the heart of everything we create.

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Dimitri Kostic

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Dimitri Kostic is an illustrator and storyboard artist whose career spans publishing and animation, with a body of work rooted in character and visual storytelling.

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He began in book publishing, illustrating for Scholastic, Rubicon and Kids Can Press, and is credited as co-illustrator of two Franklin picture books, Franklin Goes to School and Franklin and the Tooth Fairy, as the first illustrator Brenda Clark worked alongside on the series. He holds an Illustration Achievement award from the Literary Union in Belgrade.

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In animation he has worked as supervising and senior storyboard artist on CoComelon, Lucas the Spider, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, Spookley and the Christmas Kittens, Producing Parker and Total Drama Island, with earlier credits including Redwall, Franklin the Turtle, Martha Speaks, Maggie and the Ferocious Beast and Bob and Margaret. He taught storyboarding, layout and conceptual art for ten years at Max the Mutt College of Animation, Art and Design, has guest lectured at McMaster University, and still teaches online.

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Dimitri has collected graphic novels throughout his life, and his drawings are expressive and character-driven, rich with movement and warmth, blending strong design with playful, human detail. On Vincent he illustrates and colours every page himself.

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Annellie Samuel

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Annellie Samuel is an animation picture editor, writer and storyteller with more than three decades of experience in children’s television and feature animation.

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She is a two-time winner of the CCE Award for Best Editing in Animation, with three further nominations. Her credits include Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, Franklin the Turtle, Little Bear, Rolie Polie Olie, Lucas the Spider, He-Man: Masters of the Universe and Pretzel and His Puppies, among many others, and her feature work includes Riverdance: The Animated Adventure. She began her career in live-action film before moving into animation, where her work has focused on story structure, pacing, performance and emotional clarity.

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She guest lectures fourth-year animation students at Sheridan College and has taught at Humber College and Bishop Strachan School. She co-founded Animation Café, an open industry forum where editors and artists share craft knowledge, and she is an active member of the Canadian Cinema Editors, contributing to panels, initiatives and awards judging. She also mentors emerging editors.

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Our Work

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Vincent and the Vanishing Pot is a middle-grade graphic novel for readers 8 to 12, complete at roughly 210 pages.

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Chef Vincent d’Rhino reads the world by smell, and his nose has never once been wrong. When the solid-gold trophy of the cook-off he is headlining vanishes during a twenty-second blackout, he trusts it too fast, accuses an innocent guest chef, and then has to solve the theft the hard way, on evidence.

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It is a fair-play whodunit whose clues are drawn rather than written. Smell arrives on the page as colour and shape, the reader learns the vocabulary in the opening pages, and by the second act can catch a clue Vincent misses.

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The script is complete and revised. The opening five sequences, twenty-nine pages, are finished in full colour, and roughly a third of the book is thumbnailed. Dimitri illustrates and colours every page. Vincent stands alone, and Books 2 and 3 are outlined.

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Our story It’s an Ant’s Life appears in Let’s Go!: A Kids Comics Studio Anthology, published by Kids Comics Unite in 2025. We have also directed and designed ten animated nursery rhyme videos for BGM in the UK, and further projects are in development.

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Get in Touch

If you're a publisher, agent, or collaborator interested in learning more about our work, we'd be happy to hear from you. Please use the form below for professional enquiries, rights questions, or requests for additional materials.