As the pull towards African animation escalates globally among major production companies, with the continent’s attractive population size and mostly untapped market, there is an unmistakable distance from the very audience they claim to be interested in. Recent African-led projects,…
The Death of Gandji (La Mort du Gandji) (1965) is an animated short film directed and drawn by Moustapha Alassane. Widely regarded as one of the earliest animators in Niger, he produced his first animation during an internship at the…
Sixteen years after it first aired, I am watching TingaTinga Tales with my toddlers, who are two and four. They chuckle at the gags and ask me to point out which characters I designed. After two episodes, they have nearly…
Across Africa today, animators are actively defining what it means to animate Africanness for modern audiences. As digital pipelines, global distribution channels, and festival circuits expand, African animation practitioners face both opportunities and pressures: to portray identity in ways that…
In this post, I argue that Iwájú (2024) redefines African futurism through animation by mobilizing the animated urban environment of Lagos as the primary site through which class inequality, technological unevenness, and futurity are made visible and materially legible. In…
African animation scholars have discussed the role of formal art institutions in producing auteurs like Moustapha Alassane, Jean-Michel Kibushi, and Ebele Okoye (Callus 2018, Sawadogo 2019). In this piece, I propose that the African animation studio is a creative and…
In the opening minutes, Nayola narrates a dream: a man runs naked through tall grass, gunshots crack, he collapses in mud, and a mulemba tree grows from the place where he falls. In the final sequence, a masked figure crosses…
2026 marks the resurgence of animation’s most sophisticated anti-hero: Wile E. Coyote. While he has spent decades in a cycle of recursive trauma, he recently moved from the desert to the courtroom in the film Coyote v. Acme1. This cinematic…
In the years of 1953 through 1963 five hilariously funny Warners Brothers Looney Tunes were produced featuring the characters of Sam Sheepdog and his antagonist – coworker Ralph Wolf. The overarching theme of the series is the gag that Sam…
Colin Williamson’s Drawn to Nature argues that “science animation” is not a niche offshoot bolted onto cartoon history, but a force that has long shaped mainstream American animation. Williamson’s central wager is persuasive: scientific ideas about nature did not merely…
