By FREDRICK OBURA

On Wednesday last week at around seven in the evening, a crowd slowly formed at Bishop Magua Building along Nairobi’s Ngong Road.

The audience composed of middle-aged men and women who milled around a projector screen on the building’s 4th floor to catch up with Kenya’s latest animation film.

What was screened was a ten minutes animated film featuring a Maasai folktale.

The main character in the film is an Ogre, a monstrous animal that has a habit of terrorising a Maasai Village.

Story line

The ogre defies well-mounted defence from Maasai warriors, invades the homestead — manyatta — and greedily eats livestock in the compound. In making frequent visits to the village for food, the ogre slowly falls in love with a beautiful young Maasai maiden called Sanayia.

The episode ‘Legend of Ngong Hills’ a creation myth of beautiful Ngong Hills also alludes to how the hills came into being.

The ten-minute cartoon episode by Apes in Space, a local animation company represents a number of similar activities being rolled out by entrepreneurs in Kenya’s emerging animation industry.

XYZ and Tinga Tinga, which is a production of Homeboyz Entertainments, are some of the locally produced animated films defining programming in the local TV scene.

Homeboyz has just broken into the industry with Tinga Tinga Tales, a co-production with the UK’s Tiger Aspect Productions.

The 52-episode series was launched on the British Broadcasting’s pre-school channel CBeebies and marketed to Playhouse Disney.

"We are going to see more locally produced cartoons rolled out in the coming days," says Kwame Nyongo, Art Director Apes in Space.

"There is growing need for local content to feed into the changing entertainment landscape," he reckons adding that the digital broadcast, computers, web and mobile phones present a wider platforms through which creative artist can use to push their artwork.

Old habits

"This is opposed to the old days when we had only the DVD option," explained Nyongo.

"The new platforms are likely to inspire growth and enable us animators fight for the global piece of animation cake that is estimated at $75 billion annually," he says.

It is an opportunity that Mr Nyongo believes local IT entrepreneurs should exploit to come up with local content relevant to the Kenya market.

"The Legend of Ngong Hills is our first production, it took us about six weeks to develop but we are going to roll out more episodes in the coming days to fill the needs of various audiences," he says.

So far, Homeboyz have produced 26 cartoon episodes.

"Tinga Tinga Tales has really made us a focal point in Africa," says Mike Rabar, Homeboyz founder.

Rabar, however, says the Government is yet acknowledge animation’s potential by offering supportive policies.

"We need structural aid to speed up growth... the industry is huge and if built properly would become a key source of tax revenue," says Rabar.

"Structure around copyright, labour laws and all sorts legislations should be up and running," he says

He reckons that South Africa has noticed the potential of the industry and is encouraging its artists to venture into the industry by offering subsidies.

"But here, it hasn’t sunk in as an industry."

Information and Communication ministry Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo is seen as a lone believer but remains cautious that he alone cannot work miracles overnight to make his colleagues in government support the initiative.

"We need to put a little more effort into training and develop sufficient capacity to go out there and market Kenya as an animation destination." 

Ndemo has plans to develop the country’s Internet potential and this would help animators work with foreign companies and offer new local contents. Global research company, Synovate, says that daily and weekly Internet usage has more than doubled in the last two years.

market dynamics

Monthly usage has risen 80 per cent, with 3.5 million monthly users. More people are also accessing the Internet through mobile phones, and the arrival of undersea fibre-optic cables has improved broadband access. 

Ndemo, however, says that many Kenyans limit their activity to social networking sites like Facebook.

"The current numbers are not driven by local content, they are not sustainable, so we have to hurry up and do as much local content as we want," he says.

He contends that after developing infrastructure to support animation industry, the next step is to develop content. "Content is king in this area."

The launch of digital TV should offer a rich market for animators and other content providers, as the Government requires that 40 per cent of what is aired should be local content. 

Homeboys’ Rabar, whose company leads the field in Nairobi, thinks Kenya can also compete for outsourcing business in the sub-sector.

Godfrey Mwampembwa says that XYZ proved that a weekly show involving puppetry, live action and animation could be done locally and that animation could deal with weighty issues that are hard to aired using customary conventional means.

"I think it should be the job of the animation industry, the TV industry, the film industry and corporate and private industry to support animation, there is an appetite for local content in Kenya and in Africa," says Mwampembwa.

— Additional information from the Africa Report