Anti-obesity project takes toonful tack

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

But besides being a television producer, Kosaka is a mom (to daughter Akiko Bates, 7). And the more she heard about startling rates of childhood obesity in Hawai'i, the more she wanted to do something.

The result: a mischievous banana monkey and a friendly girl with purple hair. They're among the characters created for "Get Healthy Now," the state's first obesity- prevention campaign simultaneously targeting children and parents through TV public service announcements, classroom curriculum and an Internet component.

For this pilot project, public service announcements — two animated bits for children and two live-action spots aimed at grown-ups — are being distributed to commercial TV stations and PBS Hawaii. And children in kindergarten through grade three in 10 select O'ahu schools are beginning to use the lesson plans to learn more about healthful lifestyles. A Web site is in the offing, if funding can be found.

Kosaka had become increasingly concerned about the state of children's health, particularly about the growing rate of childhood obesity (averaging 20 percent to 26 percent for ages 6 to 11, and from 22 percent to 25 percent for 12- to 19-year-olds, in the most recent local study). For children, as for adults, being overweight brings with it a cluster of health problems, including elevated cholesterol and greater risk of diabetes.

Kosaka worried that children and their parents didn't understand enough about nutrition, that our over-busy lifestyles allow little time for making careful food choices, and that the new media she so enjoys working with also tends to keep kids indoors and sitting instead of outdoors and doing.

She was mulling all this over and trying to come up with an idea for a project to attack the problem when she got into conversation with her friend Mike McCartney of PBS Hawaii — she's a former producer there. She knew that working with kids presented special challenges: "When you're competing for kids' attention, you're competing with entertainment and advertising — the Disneys and the major food companies. You have to compete on that level."

McCartney suggested she enlist the aid of Sprite Entertainment, a Honolulu-based animation company founded by veterans of Square One, the company that did the computer-generated animation for the film "Final Fantasy." Their job would be the high-tech and high-touch task of putting together a tiny but very labor-intensive movie — with scripts, storyboards and recorded voice-overs, and focus groups to evaluate the early cuts — to convey Kosaka's core ideas about nutrition.

In addition, director Moto Sakakibara, president and CEO of Sprite, wanted the pieces to have a local look — thus the little girl named Lani and the Island-style house — but also one with a style distinct from other animation sources, said lead animator Roy Sato. The resulting spots are splashed with bright primary colors and have a look that's somewhere between paper cut-outs and clay animation.

Creating the cartoon characters who romp through the 3-D Island settings in the two 30-second spots took eight people two months, said Kosaka, who believes it's the first time this eye-catching technology has been used for nutritional education.

Kosaka also sought a partnership with Honolulu-based Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL, which creates educational services and products designed to preserve culture and increase literacy and quality of life, with particular concern for Pacific Islanders). They developed interactive lessons that allow children to identify sources of five fruits in their neighborhoods, for example, or five activities they could do near home that day.

With a $75,000 grant from HMSA for this pilot project and a promise from PBS and other TV stations to air the spots, all the players were in place.

While the immediate goal is to communicate some quick but important messages — eat fruit and vegetables, get on your feet and play — the longer-term desire is to measure how well the messages get across.

There are two versions of an adult public service spot, for example. One features Herman Frazier, University of Hawai'i athletic director, touting a lifelong commitment to activity and exercise as the best gift you can give your children. The other shows a guy taking great care to get the right oil for his car, then shows his son snacking on junk food and asks, "Doesn't your family deserve the best stuff too?"

The project will use focus groups and other means to measure which is more memorable. And PREL's evaluators will be looking at differences in schoolchildren's understanding of nutritional issues before and after the Get Healthy Now materials are presented.

"Right now our biggest struggle is to get additional funding for the project," so as to make it available to all children online, Kosaka said. They need about $500,000 to create 26 more PSAs, to create lesson plans and materials for families, and to mount a Web site that has already been sketched out.

Information: First Daughter Mediaworks, 739-0624.