Wolfoo

~ the obit ~

Wolfoo was a Vietnamese preschool cartoon about an anthropomorphic wolf cub living in a village drawn to look American, with a family and a circle of friends around him. Sconnect, a Hanoi studio, made it with WOA Network and put the first episodes on YouTube on 23 August 2018. It was built for the kids' YouTube economy rather than for broadcast: short and endlessly repeatable, dubbed outward into language after language, with a new channel spun up as each market opened.

That machine worked. Wolfoo passed a thousand episodes, ran on forty video-on-demand platforms in China, and accumulated viewing figures in the hundreds of millions across its channels. Sconnect went from a small animation shop to a company with a franchise, and Wolfoo became the thing it was known for.

The resemblance to Peppa Pig was obvious to anybody who looked, and it was obvious on purpose. Wolfoo was pitched at the same two-to-five-year-olds, in the same flat bright style, with the same shape of family and the same length of episode. That similarity is what started the fight in January 2022.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the scale of it ~

Entertainment One filed at the High Court of Justice in London on 24 January 2022. The claim was that Wolfoo reworked Peppa Pig's characters in its art style, and that ninety-one videos carried Peppa's exclamation sounds. The character argument ran for years across several jurisdictions, including in Vietnam, where Sconnect pushed back hard and framed the case as a large foreign rights holder trying to crush a domestic studio.

Ownership changed hands underneath the litigation. Hasbro holds Peppa Pig, and by the time the case reached judgment the claimants were Hasbro Consumer Products Licensing and Astley Baker Davies, the company founded by Peppa's original creators.

~ the case ~

Mr Justice Smith handed down summary judgment on 25 June 2026, neutral citation [2026] EWHC 1546 (Ch). The claim that succeeded was the narrow one, and it had nothing to do with the character or the art style. It was copyright in sound recordings: individual audio clips recorded for Peppa Pig episodes, character voices and effects, indirectly copied into Wolfoo's soundtrack.

The chain was traced to a contractor, a Mr Khoa, who admitted downloading sounds from Peppa Pig videos on YouTube. Sixty-seven distinct Peppa Pig sounds were identified. Of the English-language Wolfoo videos tested, every one examined contained infringing audio, and around three quarters of the foreign-language sample did too. Sconnect argued that everything after mid-2020 used in-house recordings and that the infringing videos had already been pulled.

The judge did not accept any of it. Liability for copying and for communication to the public is strict, so it made no difference that a third party had supplied the sounds. Videos described as removed had in several cases simply been moved to other channels. The claim that the newer sounds were all recorded in-house, he found, could be disproved.

~ the deadline ~

The relief was wider than the court it came from. The injunction reaches the United Kingdom and the 27 member states of the European Union, and its practical scope runs across the WTO membership, which takes in the United States and Vietnam as well. Every video featuring Wolfoo had to be gone from every platform before 16:00 BST on Monday 27 July 2026. Around three thousand videos came down.

Preschool YouTube is not somewhere I have ever had a reason to be. I was thirty-four when Wolfoo launched, and the algorithmic children's channel is a format that postdates almost everything this site exists to remember. What makes this one worth filing anyway is the mechanism. Hundreds of millions of children watched this cartoon, and its audience never left and its studio never ran out of money. What finished it was a sound effect and a court in another hemisphere setting a clock.

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