The Lasagna loving comic strip cat Garfield was created in America, but the animated television series based on the famous Jim Davis cartoon character is produced at a sprawling studio on the Indonesian resort island of Batam.
Infinite Studios started in 1997 as a film post-production company with 13 people. In part building on the success of Garfield, it has diversified into creating its own content production as well as animation and visual effects, with facilities that employ 200 people in Indonesia and Singapore.
Southeast Asia has been emerging as a film production center, with an expanding local workforce and growing exports to the region or even to the traditional creative powerhouses like the United States and Europe.
The film industry in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam is worth a total of $1.15 billion in 2014 through ticket sales (box office) and cinema advertising, and is projected to jump nearly 17 percent to $1.34 billion by 2018, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates.
Britain’s Pinewood Studios Group, famous for its James Bond film franchise, partnered the Malaysian government’s investment arm Khazanah Nasional Berhad to open Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios in June.
