“The conversation of course is going to centre around the role of animation in cultural preservation. It’s also going to be talking about how animation advances the creative industry because we think for many years the impact animation can make the creative economy has been underrated for so many years.”
Founder and Festival Director of the LIFANIMA Animation Festival, Muyiwa Kayode has asserted that The impact of animation on Nigeria’s creative economy has been underrated for years.
Speaking during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Saturday, Kayode said the festival’s 10th edition would focus on animation’s role in cultural preservation and its contribution to the creative industry, bringing together local and international stakeholders to examine its potential.
“The conversation of course is going to centre around the role of animation in cultural preservation. It’s also going to be talking about how animation advances the creative industry because we think for many years the impact animation can make the creative economy has been underrated for so many years.”
The three-day festival, scheduled for 20 to 22 October, will feature panel discussions, technology showcases, training for secondary school students and an animation competition with ₦22.5 million in cash prizes. “One of the key objectives of Le Fanima is to address these problems because what our panel sessions do every year is to bring stakeholders together. Those who can solve these problems and those who have the problems.”
Kayode said access to funding remained one of the biggest challenges facing Nigerian animators. “From my experience, the major challenge is that investors and funders, they don’t see where the money is going to come back from in animation. They don’t see it. Not that it is not there. But they don’t see it.”
He said he had approached 15 banks while developing an animated series. “When we were developing our own series, Total Tidal, we spoke to 15 banks. 15 banks. And I always put two things before the bankers. I said, I have two business ideas. One, I’m selling doors for the real estate market. And then the other one, I’m producing animated cartoons. Which one would you fund? Everybody wanted to fund the doors because they see physical things they can hold on to if I don’t pay them.”
Kayode argued that animation could generate income over a longer period because the same production could be sold repeated. “The next thing I told them is, look, if I produce animation today, I can sell it for the rest of my life. The same production.”
He also called for intellectual property to receive greater recognition as a financial asset, saying creators should be able to use their work to secure loans. “If I can put down a house to take a loan, why can’t I put down my intellectual property to take a loan? They are both properties.”
Kayode also highlighted a federal government policy aimed at increasing local animated content on television to 70 per cent. “And when we look at the animation content that we watch, especially for the children, we don’t even have 0.1% local content there.”
He said the shortage of locally produced animation had influenced his own work, including the creation of Total Tidal. “What motivated us to produce Total Taidu was simply because my kids were growing up on all these foreign cartoons. And I started asking myself as a creative person, how can we answer this challenge? And that’s why we created Total Taidu.”
Kayode said the competition allowed different animation styles but excluded AI-generated animation to give creators trained in traditional methods a fair opportunity. “Somebody can just come in and in 5 minutes, he has done something that looks fantastic. And the guys that are doing the traditional approach, which is what they are trained on, which is what they… they’ll be at a disadvantage.”
He added that questions around artificial intelligence, authorship and intellectual property still needed to be addressed. “AI has come to stay, yeah, right? But some of these issues cannot be ignored. So you have to use it the right way.”
Kayode said the quality of the story remained more important than the technology used to produce an animation. “Personally, I say AI is just another tool. It’s not whether it is 2D, 3D, AI, 4D or whatever. It is the power of the story.”
Erizia Rubyjeana
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