A new Disney short film series dramatizes traditional African storytelling for the big screen. Does it succeed?
Still from Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire © Disney (used under fair use).
In 2019, South African-based animation studio Triggerfish approached Disney Animation with an idea: an animated anthology of futuristic African stories. The idea, proposed by Kevin Kreidemann, came in the wake of Black Panther’s global black cultural statement and the renewed Afrofuturist thoughts around the world.
When Disney green-lit the project, more than 70 African directors and creatives pitched stories that had to be optimistic takes of the future told as sci-fi. That number went down to 16, then 10. Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is an animated anthology of 10 African short stories from the future. The show is the result of a collaboration between Disney Animation, Triggerfish, and 14 directors from six countries across Africa. The show has Peter Ramsey, director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, as executive producer, and Tendayi Nyeke and Anthony Silverston as supervising producers. Streaming on Disney+, Kizazi Moto is a stunning pan-African debut in animation featuring fast-paced plots and well-developed yet straightforward characters. Kizazi Moto’s pan-African scope, the Afrofuturist questions and debates it can inspire, and animation’s status as a new frontier in African cultural productions invite critical questions and reflection.
The stories in Kizazi Moto are rites of passage tales. They emphasize crossings, transitions, and transformations. Their main characters move from childhood naiveté and social non-beings into adulthood and sociocultural agents. Events and plots linger at the juncture of the obstacles and ordeals that protagonists must overcome to save their society, fulfill or acquire destiny, or attain an elite or god status. The central characters in each episode are young protagonists whose individual actions hold transformative and restorative potentials for identitarian, societal, and even ecological change. The show dramatizes the interplay between the exercise of agency and the negotiations of destiny and new beginnings just as their protagonists assume heroic status by taking chances and embodying dissent.
To think of these stories as rites of passage stories is to suggest that these animations share important elements of African oral traditions. It is to see them, at once, as pure entertainment and serious instruction, a fabrication, and a mythic reality. It is to acknowledge how their sci-fi and fantasy elements are specifically African. Each story reworks African oral tradition elements in content and form. They feature patterns and motifs, narrative strategies through which the historical storyteller sought to restore a harmonious balance between all living things, gods, and nature. In Kizazi Moto, the conflict is multiple, and the story arcs are divergent. Still, they all maintain a narrative focus at the thematic juncture of fate, destiny, and redemption. Their optimistic take on the future aligns with the oral traditional trope of exploring change on individual, social, and mythic levels. Each character and event reflects an extensive temporal stretch: they are inspired by historical moments and iconographies, sustained by current realities, and propelled by future imaginaries.
On April 30, I screened four episodes of Kizazi Moto at the Marquee Cinema at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shofela Coker, the director of “Moremi” (Episode 3), joined us for the free screening where he interacted with the audience, fielding questions about his motivations, art language, and his involvement in the Kizazi Moto project. The screening aimed to create an avenue for public engagement with the short stories. Besides the Q&A with Coker, three young scholars presented written responses to three episodes from Kizazi Moto. Each response panelist brought a disciplined eye to the episodes.
Omotola Okunlola shows how “Moremi” reworks the legend of Moremi Ajasoro, a historical queen in Yoruba land, Southwest, Nigeria. Omotola Okunlola proposes that Coker uses a “counterfactual revisioning” to undo existing framings of Moremi Ajasoro’s heroism. Reading “Stardust” (Episode 8, directed by Ahmed Teilab), Xi ‘Titilayo’ Jin explores fate and destiny at the intersection of social constraints and agency. Xi Jin interprets the main character’s relationship to fate and time as an African manifesto for its destiny. Theophilus Okunlola looks at the representations of Ogun in African literature to show how the image of the Yoruba god is complicated in “Mkhuzi: The Spirit Racer” (Episode 2, directed by Simangaliso Sibaya and Malcolm Wope).
Counterfactual revisioning in Moremi
Omotola Okunlola
Many years ago as an undergraduate at the Obafemi Awolowo University, I saw a theatrical performance of the popular legend of Moremi Ajasoro. According to the legend, and in the play I saw, Moremi sacrificed her only son, Oluorogbo, to the gods, and in exchange, she successfully helped Ile-Ife conquer the Ugbo people. At the end of the stage play, it was the lone figure of Moremi, illuminated by a single overhead light in a corner of the stage, that haunted my friends and me as we walked back to our hostel that night. We wondered about the price of victory for Moremi and asked: what kind of mother sacrifices their only son? What happens to that mother in the aftermath of such a sacrifice? In the original legend, Moremi sacrifices her only son, an act often lauded as the epitome of heroism. However, in the animated film, Moremi, director Shofela Coker adapts and reconstructs the legend to sci-fi by envisioning what could be different about it.
Coker’s futuristic imagination disrupts the patriarchal narrative that celebrates the ritual death of Moremi’s son and offers an alternative in which Olu does not die. In the animation, Moremi is a scientist who embarks on a trans-temporal and trans-spatial journey to reunite with her son, who is held captive in a temple in the spirit world. While Olu’s body lays unconscious in Moremi’s laboratory, she journeys to the land of the spirits where Olu’s spirit double, Luo, is haunted by soul-stealing monsters. Moremi traverses these worlds fighting off the monsters to reunite with Luo, and by extension, Olu. Thus, Moremi is offered redemption through this “counterfactual revisioning” of her role as a mother.
Matt Hill describes counterfactuals as narrative devices in science fiction with which readers are forced to relate to historical “facts” differently and critically. A counterfactual sci-fi (re)imagining of the Moremi legend helps us realize that by sacrificing her son, Moremi contravened the ethos of ideal Yoruba motherhood which sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi claims is an eternal commitment of “unconditional love and loyalty” to one’s child, encoded in the Yoruba concept of abiyamo or unconditional motherhood. This counterfactual revisioning, which concentrates on what could have been different about the original story, is what Coker uses in his film to reframe Moremi as abiyamo.
In the first reunion sequence after Moremi and Luo escape from the monsters back to earth, the beautiful mise en scene reflects the inner joy of a mother who has just reconnected with her son. Several wide shots of the landscape locate the mother-and-son duo in the middle of nature’s serenity. Colorful mountain peaks, green trees, and grass, the diegetic swooshing sound of the river, and the non-diegetic Leke Leke song foreground the joy, peace, and tranquility of the reunion. This sharply contrasts with the dark tone, large monsters, and eerie noise in the temple sequences when Luo is in captivity. Moremi, who had been separated from her son for a long time, is quick to resume her role as abiyamo, commenting on Luo’s physique and proceeding to feed him as she paddles across the river.
Throughout the rest of the film, Moremi positions herself as a human shield between Luo and the attackers while fighting. It is also revealed through a teleport into the past that she preserved Olu’s body in her lab by locking it up in a chamber. When the film cuts back to the present, Moremi’s love for Olu shines through again when, at death point, while being absorbed by the giant monsters, her last words are, “okan mi, my heart.” This ultimate act of sacrifice, a reversal of the original legend, is in fact what saves Moremi. Luo (Olu’s spirit double) powers his comatose body with his battery heart, and his spirit and body are reconnected. This generates a force field that not only repels the enemies but also saves Moremi. With medium close-up shots, Coker shows the relationship between Olu’s action and the gradual re-emergence of Moremi from the body of the splintering monsters. When Moremi wakes up at the end of the film, mother and son palm each other’s faces as if seeking haptic reassurance of their new reality, a life in which they both exist.
In the popular imagination, the story of Moremi often connotes that there is an inherent tension between motherhood, heroism, and the ideals of a warrior, in which case to be a warrior is to kill the maternal bond and become a man. In Coker’s work, however, the sexist strains of this story are interrupted to reimagine the past and open possibilities for new futures where a woman does not have to shrink herself to take up leadership positions.
No one way be African
Theophilus Okunlola
My main objective is to elucidate the connections between “Mkhuzi: The Spirit Racer,” and a few other earlier African cultural productions that the animation alludes to. Using these connections, I will highlight the shared features between animations and other African cultural productions.
While Manzo and his mother Manomi, are the endearing characters in the film, it is the villain, Ogun: the intergalactic overload, that immediately sets in motion how we can link the animation film to several other African cultural productions. For students of African literature, Ogun is not a new character. Ogun is a god in the Yoruba pantheon. His many characters as the god of war, metals and metallurgy, defender of the mercies, but also a fiery and bloodlust destroyer have been employed in key African literary texts—especially the ones that are politically invested in African independence from oppressive rule. Ogun as a literary figure became popular with the publication of Wole Soyinka’s epic poem, Idanre in 1967. Ogun made another return in African literature with Soyinka’s publication of another long poem, Ogun Abibiman in 1976 (I will return to this poem later). Ogun is also evoked in Pepetela’s 1979 novel, Mayombe, about the guerrilla fighters during Angola’s anti-colonial struggle against Portugal. The transnational movement of Ogun in these texts suggests what we can see as a form of African indigeneity, Ogun is a figure that is transnationally indigenous within Africa. Ogun’s appearance in “Mkhuzi,” continues this pattern of transitional indigeneity. Why does Ogun feature in a narrative about a Soweto neighborhood? My answer is that it is because the animation film takes seriously the agility and mobility of African indigenous ideas and figures that are entrenched in ubiquitous African cultural productions.
Let me get back to Ogun Abibiman. In the long poem, Ogun meets Shaka the Zulu, and the union between them, Soyinka envisions, will stir the needed momentum in the fight against apartheid rule in South Africa which will lead to the freedom of the people. Importantly, bringing together Ogun and Shaka also evokes another quintessential African literary text, that is Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, published in 1925 in Sesotho, and translated to English in 1931. Mofolo’s novel is a retelling of the story of Chaka, the famous Zulu king and warrior. But there is a seeming contradiction between most of the previous literary references of Ogun, and what we find in the animation. Ogun’s reification as an inspiration for the march for freedom in the previous texts contradicts his appearance as a villain who will try to gentrify a neighborhood in Soweto unless his overbearing ego is placated. “Mkhuzi” is inviting us to ask a question: What exactly is the will of Ogun? Is he a freedom fighter or a tyrant? Linking “Mkhuzi” with the many other texts before it asks us to embrace the paradox of freedom and tyranny as co-constitutive.
After all, without the tyranny of Ogun, Manzo would not have been in the situation where he would find his ancestors and finally embrace the totality of his Zulu origin. Embracing the totality of his origin leads to Manzo’s freedom and an end to his desire to be like Mkhuzi (as he says at the beginning of the film). Manzo meets the ancestors through the hyperspeed technology that condenses space-time. The animation asks us to put on our hypercam to see the ancestors who, by the way, do not exist in the past, but somewhere within the condensation of space-time. The condensation of space-time also allows us to read the previous appearances of Ogun as ancestral narratives to Mkhuzi, and in other to reiterate the following conclusions:
One, African stories are simultaneously transnational and indigenous, and they are, to follow “Mkhuzi’s” claim, intergalactic. Two, African stories are complex and dense. Unlike Soyinka’s highly esoteric epic poem, Idanre, where he introduces Ogun, we might be endeared to animations like “Mkhuzi” because of their simplicity. This is fine. But this simplicity must not deceive us, something can be simple but equally profound. African stories and cultural productions have always existed within this spectrum of simplicity, complexity, and profundity. There is no single way to write, read, and engage with an African story, just like there is no seemingly one way to be an African.
Destiny and the unpredictable
Xi “Títílayọ̀” Jin
“Stardust” is my favorite episode in the Kizazi Moto animation series. Like preceding episodes, “Stardust” navigates the rich terrains of personal growth and identity, but the episode is beautifully enriched by North African Islamic visual and musical motifs, weaving a profound dialogue between the individual and the cosmos into its fabric.
The story unfolds in a world where children coming of age receive destiny scrolls from the Oracle. These scrolls, infused with cosmic power from the stars, outline their life paths. However, our protagonist, Nawara, is denied this right; she is labeled “unworthy” by a droid guard because of her humble origins. Defying this exclusion, Nawara still protects the Oracle and the stars in a decisive act that prioritizes justice over kinship loyalty. At the climax of the story, following a brave battle, Nawara stands next to the Oracle, gazing into the clear sky, and comes to understand the true essence of her destiny.
Two lines of dialogue from the episode deserve thoughtful consideration. At the beginning of the story, the Oracle asks Nawara, “What do you want to be? Dusty Lady?” Nawara’s reply, “Anything, but this,” indicates her eagerness to erase her past and flee her current situation. By the end of the story, after learning that the Oracle also once received an empty scroll, Nawara realizes that there is no predetermined future beyond her own decisions. When the Oracle poses the question again, “What do you want to be? Dusty Lady?” Nawara’s response has evolved to “Nothing, but this.”
I view Nawara’s two responses as critical junctures where she reshapes historical consciousness and politicizes time. In her first reply, she rejects the future that her society—represented by the droid guard and her own people—has prescribed for her, a future marked by continuous exclusion and marginalization. She advocates for change, seeking guidance from higher powers and authorities, symbolized by the Oracle and the stars, to forge a new path. In her second response, Nawara no longer seeks her destiny from external sources, perhaps realizing that an assigned path, no matter how appealing it may seem, does not lead to true freedom and liberation. Her reply, “Nothing, but this,” signifies her acceptance of the empty scroll in her hands—a present within her control and a future still free, awaiting her inscription.
This moment repoliticizes the concept of time, suggesting that the future is not external to us; it does not have to be a relentless series of disruptions, constraints, and barriers. Instead, the empty scroll heralds a political vision for the future that nurtures a realm of infinite possibilities, transforming the traditional narrative of time from a linear and fixed trajectory into something dynamic and open-ended. When doubts cloud our existence, we often look to the sky, longing for the stars to bestow their answers upon us. Should we feel frustrated when our destiny appears obscured or bleak? The Oracle counsels patience; he says, “The timing of the scroll is meticulous. Wait for the tick.” Nawara’s actions illuminate us: this very ambiguity might just be the most profound blessing that time has to grace us with.
Drawing on this, may I suggest interpreting the episode as an African manifesto for its destiny—a continent that has long struggled to reclaim its voice and subjectivity?
It seems fitting to invoke the insights of Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe and Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr. In the preface of The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings, they write, “The time for refutation is over. It is now time for conditional affirmation, that is, for the exploration of other possibilities for a future yet to be written, a future with neither promise nor guarantee, an emergent future rich in possibilities and charged with life.”
I believe this emergence is exactly what the episode “Stardust” announces.
