Hawaii Film Partners has created a successor to its first hit TV show, and this time around, it involves a bunch of monkey business.

The O'ahu studio, which recently wound up a successful three-season run of its teen drama "Flight 29 Down," will now produce "Ape Escape," an animated series that will run on Nickelodeon's digital Nicktoons Network early next year.

Work on 38 two-minute episodes is scheduled to start today at a production office in a Hawai'i Kai shopping center, said Rann Watumull, who founded the studio with his wife in 2002.

"We have wanted to get into animation," he said. "This is a baby step, getting our feet wet."

The entire project will cost about $1 million, he said.

Most of the work will be done on computers, and Watumull plans to hire seven local animators. Hiring local employees rather than flying them from the Mainland has been a theme for the studio since it began shooting "Flight 29 Down."

"It's very ambitious," Watumull said. "It will only work if you can find good, talented people. I have come to find out that making cartoons is about having quality artists having fun."

"Ape Escape" is based on Sony's popular PlayStation video game, first released in 1999. The game told the story of a monkey named Specter who gets possession of a special helmet that makes him smart.

And what do smart monkeys want to do? Take over the world, of course.

But Specter has to defeat a boy named Spike.

"All the stories are just so random," said Jared Matsushige, a 27-year-old Kaimuki animator hired for the series. "They're funny. There is a lot of slapstick in them. It's definitely for kids. It is silly, funny, simple humor."

Matsushige, a professional animator for seven years, was drawn to the fact that "Ape Escape" was locally produced. Most major animation projects would require him to move to the Mainland, he said.

"There are small jobs here and there, but they are all short-term jobs, commercials," he said.

Steady local work is the same lure — or banana — for the pool of Hawai'i actors vying for voice-over roles in the series.

Brittany Ross, a 21-year-old aspiring actress and journalism student at Hawai'i Pacific University, e-mailed a sound bite to the studio, saying she had "a different voice."

That's an understatement. The Waikiki resident sounds like a Smurf. Or her 7-year-old sister back in Houston.

"I sound a lot younger than I am," she said. "That's a good thing for voice-over work. All the cartoon characters are not 5-year-olds. They are grown people who have little voices."

An active imagination helps, too, said Mary Ann Teheny, an underwriter for First Insurance.

The 46-year-old Kaka'ako resident has acted on stage for much of her life and said in her application that she can create 15 different voices.

It was a skill she picked up at the dinner table, as the youngest of nine children growing up in San Francisco.

"We were always doing character voices and imitating people and making animal sounds," she said.

But could she sound like a monkey bent on world domination?

"I've noticed in movies that they don't give the animals any animal voices," Teheny said. "They give them human voices."

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.