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Up With Paper, the original pop-up card company, has concluded a licensing agreement with Vooks, a streaming platform for animated storybooks, to animate selected titles from the company’s award-winning line of Jumping Jack Press pop-up books.

The companies delivered a soft launch roll-out of the initial title for the partnership, Halloween at the Zoo, in October 2019, and have now partnered to create a beautiful, now animated, version of The Mitten: a Classic Pop-up Folktale written by Jessica Southwick, illustrated by Pippa Curnick, constructed by award-winning paper engineer Yevgeniya Yeretskaya, and published by Jumping Jack Press. This new title is available to Vooks’ subscribers now, on the company’s website at www.vooks.com.

In this sweet retelling of the classic Ukrainian folk tale, a boy’s lost mitten is discovered by a group of curious woodland animals. Charming illustrations of snow-covered hills and gently falling snowflakes conjure feelings of winter outings on cold crisp days. With festive music sure to put anyone in the holiday mood, the merry cast of critters will surprise and delight imaginative young minds. Animated from a deluxe pop-up book, The Mitten combines elements of the pop-up style with unique three-dimensional puppet-show-like visuals. 

“We are quite pleased with this new partnership with Vooks,” said George White, president for Up With Paper. “The Vooks team does a beautiful job rendering our pop-up books in animated form, and we stand fully behind their goal of providing entertaining ways to encourage young people to read. The fact that the two titles we now have on the site have generated more than one million minutes of online reading is just thrilling!”  

The companies will be rolling out more titles on the Vooks platform in 2020 and beyond as part of the long-term partnership.

“It’s important to us that children’s books remain relevant in this digital age, and that authors and illustrators continue to flourish,” said Marshall Bex, founder of Vooks. “With Vooks, children can learn, laugh and let their imaginations soar, while parents can feel good about letting their little ones enjoy quality screen time.”

Originally founded as PopShots Inc. in 1978, Up With Paper has been recognized for design excellence more than 100 times with the Greeting Card Association’s highest honor, the LOUIE award, including the Card of the Year LOUIE Award in 2005, 2018, and 2019. Up With Paper also publishes a line of award-winning pop-up books under its Jumping Jack Press imprint.

Vooks is a streaming platform for animated storybooks offering a whole new way to experience the stories we love and trust, with a growing library that both kids (2-8 years of age) and parents will enjoy. By adding movement, sound and narration to existing books, Vooks transports stories off the page, promoting focus, literacy and imagination. Vooks provides parents and teachers with a kid-friendly, ad-free screen time option without the risk of young ones stumbling onto content that is not age-appropriate. Vooks takes great care to maintain the integrity of each storybook’s original artwork, story and vision, working directly with the top publishers, authors, and illustrators around the world.