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 addition, this piece treats Lagos city in Iwájú not as a backdrop but as an authored environment whose architecture, infrastructure, soundscapes, and modes of circulation show power dynamics and social hierarchy.

Scholars of animation have long debated the relationship between reality, movement, and world-building, particularly animation’s capacity to construct rather than record the world (Wells 2013; Beckman 2014). Yet despite these foundational interventions, animation studies often pay limited attention to urban space as a central analytical category. For example, canonical animated cities such as Akira’s Neo-Tokyo (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, 2018) are often discussed in terms of stylistic innovation, visual excess, or formal experimentation. While such analyses are important, they fall short of interrogating how animated cities encode socio-spatial politics, class divisions, infrastructure, and uneven access to futurity. Even when the city is foregrounded, it often functions as a spectacle rather than as an environment structured by power.

Against this backdrop, Disney/Kugali’s Iwájú represents a significant intervention. Set in a near-future Lagos, this six-part series mobilizes animation’s world-building capacity to materialize African Futurism through urban space. Ytasha Womack (2013), in her book titled Afrofuturism: The world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture, imagines black futures where technology, culture, and liberation intersect (9). She coined Afrofuturism as a cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement that blends speculative imagination, science fiction, fantasy, and technology with Black histories and diasporic experiences. This term reimagines futures and alternate realities in which black people who are often marginalized in dominant futurist narratives are now centered as innovators, visionaries, and world builders. However, many African creators, such as Nnedi Okorafor, prefer the term African futurism, which centers African, not diasporic, experiences. Iwaju aligns more closely with African futurism; its Lagos is rooted in Nigerian cultural logics, rather than the diasporic experience that characterizes Afrofuturism. It departs from Western tropes of African representation by grounding futurity in local textures such as food, clothing, languages, and architecture while acknowledging global technological flows. This hybrid vision aligns with Achille Mbembe’s writing on African urban futures as sites of improvisation and anticipation. Kugali’s collaboration with Disney further complicates matters; while it amplifies the global reach, it also raises questions about how African futurism is mediated through Western corporate infrastructures. 

The vision of Lagos city in Iwájú is grounded in Nigerian social realities, languages, foodways, clothing, and architectural forms, while remaining attentive to global technological flows. Lagos city in the series is not simply a setting for narrative action; it is an animated environment through which class division, technological inequality, and speculative aspiration are spatially organized. The future in Iwájú is not abstract or evenly distributed; it is built into the city’s architecture, circulation systems, and sensory textures. Iwájú’s Lagos is vertically and horizontally stratified with the presence of elevated, secured spaces that house technological privilege, while ground-level environments are marked by density, exposure, and infrastructural precarity. Animation makes these inequalities immediately legible. Bridges, drones, surveillance systems, and transit corridors function as class markers, determining who can move freely, who is watched, and who remains vulnerable. Rather than explaining inequality through dialogue, the series allows viewers to experience it through spatial design and movement. The animated environment itself becomes the argument.

Fig. 1: Establishing shot emphasizing vertical separation between the elite (Island) and the marginalized zone (Mainland) of Lagos city in Iwájú.

This spatial logic aligns closely with African Futurism’s emphasis on local material realities rather than universalized techno-utopian visions. Iwájú presents multiple, coexisting futures within the same city; futures shaped by access to infrastructure, technology, and security. Lagos emerges as a city where advanced innovation does not erase inequality but intensifies it. Animation’s plasticity allows these contradictions to coexist seamlessly, reinforcing African Futurism as a mode of speculation grounded in uneven modernity rather than transcendence.

Sound and language further deepen this environmental differentiation. The city’s sonic landscape shifts across classed spaces: affluent environments are quieter and regulated, while lower-income areas pulse with mechanical noise, traffic, and overlapping speech. Linguistic registers similarly vary, with Nigerian vernacular and Yoruba-inflected English grounding futurity in cultural continuity rather than rupture. These auditory textures situate Lagos city as a lived, inhabited city, resisting the flattening tendencies of global animation and reinforcing the specificity of African urban experience.

Fig. 2: Mainland street scene highlighting density, sound, and surveillance technologies.

Technology in Iwájú is not framed as inherently emancipatory. Prosthetics, AI systems, and surveillance tools are unevenly distributed, reinforcing existing hierarchies rather than dissolving them. The animated environment makes this imbalance visible by embedding technology directly into walls, vehicles, and domestic spaces. Futurity becomes an environmental condition, something one inhabits differently depending on class position. In this sense, Iwájú reframes African Futurism as critical and diagnostic, paying attention to the political implications of technological progress.

The series’ production context further underscores these dynamics. As a collaboration between Disney and Kugali, Iwájú operates within global media infrastructures while foregrounding local authorship and Nigerian cultural specificity. This tension mirrors the city it depicts, just as Lagos contains uneven futures, Iwájú circulates unevenly within platform capitalism, shaped by corporate distribution and global visibility. The animated environment thus reflects both urban inequality and the conditions under which African futures are produced and consumed.

Ultimately, Iwájú demonstrates how animated environments can function as critical sites for thinking African Futurism, class, and urban politics. By materializing inequality through space, infrastructure, sound, and movement, the series insists that futurity is environmental and uneven. Lagos becomes a living animated city whose form encodes historical inequalities while imagining contested futures. In foregrounding the city as an authored environment, Iwájú challenges animation studies to take urban space seriously, not merely as spectacle, but as a central terrain where power, class, and African futurist imaginaries are negotiated.

References:

Beckman, K. (Ed.). (2014). Front Matter. In Animating Film Theory (pp. i–vi). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sn1f6.1

Colliva, Teresa. « Nnedi Okorafor: Trajectories of an African Futurism ». Il Tolomeo, no 1, décembre 2021, p. JournalArticle_6924. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2021/23/022.

Iwájú | « The Real Lagos » | Disney+. Réalisé par Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2024. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o99Zrn0vEkY.

Mbembe, Achille, et Sarah Nuttall. « Writing the World from an African Metropolis ». Public Culture, vol. 16, no 3, septembre 2004, p. 347‑72. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-347.

Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. 0 éd., Routledge, 2013. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315004044

System. « Iwájú ». Grokipedia, https://grokipedia.com/page/Iw%C3%A1j%C3%BA Consulted On 26 November 2025.

Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. First edition, Lawrence Hill Books, 2013. BnF ISBN. 

Julius Aderogba Odewabi is a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, where he is currently pursuing his PhD in Film and Media Studies with a concentration in French. He is from Osun State, Nigeria. Julius holds a bachelor’s degree from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria. He then proceeded to a master’s degree at the University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, in 2022, and subsequently another master’s degree in French and Francophone studies at the University of Florida, USA, in 2024. His research explores environmental and ecological miscommunication in contemporary Film and Media studies, Extraction and extractive narration, Ecological Trauma and representation, French and Francophone media, and the politics of representation in the Global South.