Three years in the making and RM4 million later, Malaysia’s first 3D animated feature film GENG: Pengembaraan Bermula (The Adventure Begins) by MSC Malaysia company Les’ Copaque Production will make its debut in cinemas across Malaysia on 12 February, 2009.

Les’ Copaque creative and marketing director, Mohd Nizam Abdul Razak expects Geng to make a total of RM10 million in revenue from ticket sales in Malaysia alone plus more from related merchandise sales.

Nizam, who spoke to Comm & Tech Asia at Geng’s media preview at Cineleisure Damansara on 13 January, said Geng would show for two weeks with a possibility of an extension based upon demand.

Unlike typical animation films, Les’ Copaque only had 40 production staff instead of 120 and instead of using rather pricey Apple Mac workstations, they instead used widely available and highly affordable Windows-based PCs.

Geng begins with two friends, city boys Badrol and Lim who set out for the village Kampung Durian Runtuh to solve the mystery of a “ghost,” which Badrol’s grandfather, who lives there, alleges on TV to be responsible for eating the durians which fell in his orchard at night.

The pair put up with Badrol’s grandfather and in the course of their investigations, draw in the village twins Upin and Ipin, their sister Ros the village beauty, the boy Rajoo who has the ability to speak with animals and a rather unusual cute, furry animal named Oopet which they befriend.

The gang go through go through a whole lot of nail-biting adventure, surprises, tears, fears and dangerous encounters in a truly Malaysian spirit to get to the bottom of this mystery of this durian-eating ghost.

Upin and Ipin were featured in the film’s widely distributed trailer and due to much interest in them, Les’ Copaque earlier created a spinoff animated mini-series called Upin & Ipin shown on TV9 during the month of Ramadan, 2008 and received 1.5 million views.

Geng features Malaysians from the three major ethnic groups living and interacting together very harmoniously and also reflects Malaysian culture and etiquette as an example of the ideal Malaysian society with all its unique features and characteristics.

Les’ Copaque managing director Burhanuddin Md Radzi said Geng would be launched overseas from June at the earliest because it will be shown at the Annecy 2009  Intarnational Animated Film Festival in France in mid-June and to qualify it must not have been shown outside its country of origin.

It already has a distributor in Indonesia and had already received distributorship enquiries from India and Argentina and its original dialogue in Bahasa Melayu will be replaced with relevant local languages if requested.

The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) helped by letting Les’ Copaque exhibit in its booth at MIPCOM and MIP TV in Cannes, France, helped it apply for funding. Including from, the eContent Grant, and exposed them to new ideals and talents, while the Ministry of Science. Technology and Innovation also played an important role.

MIMOS let Les’ Copaque use its rendering facilities of a super computer required to render the film’s 2,000 x 1,080 pixels frame resolution required to avoid pixilation when displayed on a large screen.