Funline Animation

Funline Animation was started by Helena Giersz in 1997 at the corner of Bleecker and Broadway in New York City. First clients were: Nickelodeon, Disney, Scholastic A&E and others. In 1999, based on one of my Nick ID, I was asked to design a new show for Nick Jr. at that time called “Nina’s Pop-up Puzzle”, a show that later became known worldwide as “Dora the Explorer”. 

The show took off, turning Funline Animation into Funline Animation/Dora Production Studio.  I hired more people and expanded.  Everything started happening very quickly, and Funline Animation produced “Dora The Explorer” – The Pilot.In 1997 I was hired by Nick Jr. to go to Nickelodeon Studios in Burbank, CA, to co-produce first season of Dora.  The next chapter for Funline Animation was a project from Scholastic, 2 computer games starring Clifford, The Big Red Dog.

In 2004 I started working on character designs for the  Nick Jr. series “Go Diego Go”, a Nick Jr. series, but I never stopped working on my own independent projects.

Designing my own projects is something that always excites me and makes my work new and unpredictable.

…peace and love:)…

Helena Giersz

Helena Giersz-Uszac is an animation director and character designer. Studied graphic design, majoring in animation at the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) in Warsaw. In 1979, she began her animation career at Studio Miniatur Filmowych.

In 1991, she moved to the United States and began working for Sesame Street and Nickelodeon, creating short multimedia animations.

In 1997, Helena founded Funline Animation Studio where she began collaboration with Nick Jr. on a new show called Nina’s Pop-up Puzzle. After the first six characters (Dora, Boots, Benito, Tico, Swiper, and Isa) got approved, she was commissioned to create a pilot for the series which later became known as Dora the Explorer. The series took off, transforming Funline Animation into a Dora-focused production studio. Over the next fifteen years she created over a thousand characters for the series and over twenty online games for Nick Jr online.

In 2004 she produced animation on two computer games starring Clifford, the Big Red Dog for Scholastic. In 2004, she made a film titled, Do Other Things, which received the Best of the Fest award at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. During that same year, Helena started working on character designs for the Nick Jr. series Go Diego Go!

In 2011 she created a documentary about Polish composer, singer and guitarist Krzysztof Klenczon. She also produced a photo album book about The Red Guitars, the most famous Polish rock band of the 1960’s.

2016 she began working on her independent movie based on her experiences of growing up in Eastern Europe and moving to the US.