The Legend of Hei (2019) did not begin as a stand-alone animated feature but emerged from The Legend of Luo Xiaohei (罗小黑战记), which is a web animation created by MTJJ that first aired in 2011. By the time the animation…
Led by Chinese animation pioneers such as Te Wei and Tadahito Mochinaga, who was also known as Fang Ming, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) established in the late 1950s a singular visual modernity through traditional ink-wash animation. Masterpieces such…
The development of early Chinese animation is closely intertwined with China’s cultural policy, political movements, and educational initiatives, and cannot be fully understood without situating it in the historical and social context of the Republican era. This text explores how…
I am performative researcher, theorising through what Brad Haseman calls “enthusiasm of practice” (Haseman, 2006) rather than a premeditated research question. In performative research the practice itself is primary; the research results may embody knowledge which might not be adequately…
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…
