Le Cube reaches global dimensions

Led by creative director Ralph Karam and executive producers Gustavo Karam and Juan Manuel Freire, award-winning international animation studio Le Cube is known for its dynamic, playful and visually striking 2d cell animation, illustration and character design.  

Founded in 2010, the studio has created work across the world for global brands from Cartoon Network to Coca-Cola, and is proud to be an international, cross-cultural studio breaking down the boundaries between the traditional television, branding and gaming worlds. 

Balancing their love for traditional animation techniques with a fascination with new technology, they bring to life vivid, soulful, character-driven stories rooted in intensive culture research, which have scooped them awards at festivals including Cannes Lions, Ciclope, NY Festivals, LIA, Clio, Promax, and BassAwards among others. 

We caught up with brothers Gus and Ralph after their keynote at OFFF Festival in Barcelona earlier this year, to discuss the evolving animation landscape, the challenges of running a 24-hour international studio, and how they are navigating the rapid development of new technology. 

Above: Le Cube creative director Ralph Karam and executive producer Gustavo Karam talking at OFFF Festival 2026.

What were your journeys into the industry like before founding Le Cube? 

Ralph: I started off freelancing as a Graphic Designer and worked for a lot of different studios. I got into animation when I moved to Argentina, because the animation scene was huge there. I started to collaborate with several studios, and I found building teams came very naturally to me.  

At the time, Gus was living in Brazil, so we started to connect clients from Brazil with talent from Argentina. But way before that, we're brothers. We've been collaborating forever. That’s how the story started!  

Gus: My background is in advertising agencies. When I entered the industry in Argentina, branding was all very connected to television. I think we were one of the first studios to fill this gap in advertising, commercial brands, brand entertainment, trying to find other ways to work besides TV.  

What did you want to do differently from other studios from the start? 

Gus: Something that was very important since the beginning was the idea of being global. Even before the pandemic, we were all working remotely on Skype every day, so we never really felt connected with any market or territory. This is something I'm very proud of: that we were at the beginning of the internationalisation of Latin studios to the world. That’s important to us at Le Cube – the whole idea of global scale. Learning other cultures, expanding and travelling as much as we can. 

She told us, “The eyes aren’t right yet.” So that was the level of detail that this project had, we had his sister saying, “I want to see Senna. I want to see my brother.” 

Ralph: We didn't want to put all our eggs in the same basket. We worked with TV and broadcast, then we work with advertising, with entertainment, and we started working with gaming as well. We try to diversify and have different markets and cross talent.

We learn how to produce with an advertising mindset, and we know how to build a team very fast. Then we apply that to entertainment, for example, which is completely different. If a client from advertising wants to tell a story that is different, we bring a scriptwriter from entertainment. So, we can cross different types of talents for different types of industries. 

Where do you find inspiration outside of animation? 

Gus: For me, I would say underground culture, music for sure, and fashion. Those are things that I really like, and I think that we bring in besides animation. But then there is the wine and the food. The soul is important as well. 

Ralph: I like things being handcrafted or made with care. People thinking about what they are doing, and objects. Not only objects, but it can be a movie, it can be clothes, or it can be a party. I like when they feel that there is soul behind it. And thoughts. Yes, this is what inspires me in general. Aesthetic in general. 

Our other project is our art gallery, which is kind of a playground where we can experiment. The idea is to bring people that maybe you won't see in a traditional art gallery, because they have advertising or gaming backgrounds, for example. We created a physical space to legitimise artist’ talent and give them a space to explore. And this is what we like to do – to erase the boundaries. 

Was there a project early on where Le Cube’s visual identity really clicked into place, where you thought, “This is the kind of work that we want to make”? 

Gus: I think it was our film Senna, for the Ayrton Senna Institute. It was for the Olympic Games in Brazil, about Brazilian Formula One racer Ayrton Senna, who became the number one in the world. It was very symbolic for us as well because it was the project that internationalised us, that made everyone say, “Whoa, which studio did that?” 

One day you're doing something for a soy milk brand, and the other day you're doing Coca-Cola. My Google algorithm is crazy, because sometimes it thinks that I just really love soy milk.

We did everything on this project, and it paid off. It has so much care. We worked closely with the agencies on everything from basic creativity until the end. I think that's why it's so solid.  

Ralph: We had a chance to collaborate with his family as well. It was great to receive feedback from people that knew him in person and said that our project gave them goosebumps. We were working directly with his sister. And I think we drew, I don't know, 20 sets of eyes. She told us, “The eyes aren’t right yet.” So that was the level of detail that this project had, we had his sister saying, “I want to see Senna. I want to see my brother.” 

Can you walk us through your creative process?  

Gus: We do a lot of cultural research first. Something interesting about working with advertising is that you never know what will come. One day you're doing something for a soymilk brand, and the other day you're doing Coca-Cola. My Google algorithm is crazy, because sometimes it thinks that I just really love soymilk 

There is a part of the process that is diving deep into the project or into the idea. We like to have at least the first week to digest, and then we start drawing. We also like to get straight into the motion, so we start off with animatics. 

Ralph: It's like a factory. We’re organised. We'll have a pencil department, a cleanup department, then the colour guys. We try not to improvise when we enter production. The beginning is freer, we can draw some ideas, we can explore something a little bit looser, but when we start the production, it's very structured. Then I tend to be, as a director, very involved in the final stage, in post-production. I like to do comps by myself. 

What was a recent project you’ve been really excited about? 

Gus: A collaboration we did with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios [a stop-motion studio from LA], the guys who did Robot Chicken . They wanted to do a 2D animated short film in collaboration with DJ Marshmello. It was funded by Nounce Festival, a platform that is crowdfunding projects through crypto communities.  

It's tough to wake up every morning knowing that a whole day happened. You go to sleep with zero emails because we read everything, and then you wake up the next day with 56 emails.

It's a short film about a deaf girl who has synaesthesia, a condition where you can see sounds. It was nice to make because there is no commercial purpose behind it. It's not to launch a new record or new songs from Marshmello. For me, it connects a lot of things we love. I love cassettes, and there are a lot of futuristic, anime references. 

Ralph: We are kind of all alienated now by social media, all the time, with our cell phones, so I think there's a beautiful message behind the film too. We invested our own money into it and were almost co-producers, because it was low budget. We created four minutes of animation in three months, which for this type of animation is a lot, especially with all the production and designs.  

What have been some of the biggest challenges and rewards of running your own studio today? 

Gus: I think the biggest challenge is the entrepreneurship part. Our parents are professors and psychologists, so we really didn't learn how to be entrepreneurs. Everything was very much discovering as we do. 

I think there is also difference between generations. With millennials and Gen Z, there's a lot of talk about mental health. Our generation kind of discovered it, because we fucked up with that. 

It's tough to wake up every morning knowing that a whole day happened. You go to sleep with zero emails because we read everything, and then you wake up the next day with 56 emails. At the same time, it's awesome because you feel that you are everywhere. But it's also a lot of pressure for sure, which, so far, has been fun, but still. 

Ralph: We also built this idea of having a 24-hour pipeline, which sounds amazing in theory, but it's really hard to manage. The pandemic helped a little bit because after lockdown it was easier to have people on board working remotely, and this kind of helped our way of working. But before that, it was really challenging; having talent in Argentina working with people here in France, and everyone being in different places. 

What do you think animation as an industry is getting right? And what needs to be improved? 

Gus: I think the animation industry is in a very challenging moment. It's a moment when we need to see new things and really see what matters. It's a definitive year, like when jazz first came up, it became a lot of other styles and a lot of subgenres were born. 

 If you talk to an animator from 30 years ago, he probably won't say, “Fuck this, let's just do everything on paper.”

We need to figure out what the new moment of animation is. Let's see if this will be AI, with smaller teams, or if it's going to be Laika, or going as raw as possible and doing cell paper again. 

Ralph: Or maybe we'll separate a little bit. Maybe we'll still have the crafts, like Ghibli or Disney, creating things with three years of production. 

I think we're in an interesting moment. Animation is everywhere because of all the screens we have all the time, the cell phone, graphics are everywhere. This has started to become more common in our interactions over the last 10 or 15 years. So there is a lot of room for animation. It's not something that will die.