In 2015, South African animation studio Triggerfish, which is best known for animated features such as Zambezia, Khumba and Seal Team and producing episodes of Disney+’s Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire and Star Wars: Visions Volume II, launched a pan-African talent search for animation projects. With support from Disney, the Triggerfish Story Lab received close to 1,400 entries from all over the continent. Eight years later, all of the Story Lab winners’ projects have come to fruition.
Marc Dey and Kelly Dillon are co-creators of the preschool series Kiya & The Kimoja Heroes on Disney Junior and Lucy Heavens is co-creator of Kiff on Disney Channel. Malenga Mulendema’s series Supa Team 4 premiered in July on Netflix. And Mike Scott is co-creator of a series launching soon across the continent on African streamer Showmax. This week, we had the chance to chat with Anthony Silverston, creative director at Triggerfish Animation Studios, about these remarkable achievements. Here is what he told us:
Anthony Silverston: Yes, very busy — I’m still feeling the effects! Even though we’ve been hard at work for years on many of the projects, 2023 was the year Triggerfish really came of age with many of them coming out over a span of five months. We were working on 11 short films at once: Aau’s Song, which released May 4th as part of Star Wars: Visions Volume II and then Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire released on Disney+ July 5th.
In between those bigger projects, a beautiful independent 2D short which we supported called Indlela Yokuphila also released online June 7th. Two of our shows selected in our Story Lab, and which we developed and co-produced, were launched — the first season of Supa Team 4 on Netflix July 20th and then Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes — which has already released some episodes in the U.S. and launches locally in South Africa September 4th.
It’s very exciting to see all of these different representations of characters and worlds from Africa on screen, because there really have been so few instances before this. So even though it does sound like a lot, I’m hoping it’s just the start of a normalization in the general diversity of content available.
After successful feature enterprises like Zambezia, Khumba and Seal Team, we saw Triggerfish take part in more anthologies and TV series. Can you tell us about your take on producing features vs. series?
We have made three independent features and, although it’s no less challenging, we know how to do them. It suits our studio and we have a few in development, one with a larger studio partner. Features are hard to plan around because it can take years for a script to be greenlit and for the funding to fall into place. Series are much easier to plan a studio production pipeline around. We are still growing the capacity and expertise on the continent and, although we are in a much better place to take on series work now, it would have still been more of a challenge just a few years ago.
For Supa Team 4, we did all the development, writing and pre-production, and Superprod handled production, while with Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes, we were more involved in development and writing and were across all aspects of production to ensure authenticity, with the CG handled by TeamTO and managed by Frog Box.
Early next year, we’re launching production on our own preschool show, Rosy Days. It is based on our short film, Belly Flop, by Kelly Dillon, which showed at over 140 festivals and won about 14 awards — many of them children’s audience awards. We’ve started the writing process with Kelly and the creative team all of whom also worked on Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes, and I’m loving how the full series is coming together, giving depth to this extremely likable character.
Anthologies kind of fall in between features and series — doing Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire felt like we were doing 10 features at once! Luckily, we’d had a lot of experience working with Magic Light Pictures on the Christmas specials for BBC One, and we had a lot of support from the team at Disney EMEA, so we’ve become expert at the short film format. The downside is that there is no economy or efficiency of scale, but on the upside, there are many more opportunities for key crew such as directors to gain experience.
What did you love best about working on Kizazi Moto?
Working with all the incredible talent was definitely the best part. Even though we did this whole project over the pandemic, we built a close-knit community. When all the directors got to meet up in real life for the first time for a screening in L.A., the energy and love was palpable. Everyone knew we were doing something important, and there’s a stress that comes with that, which brings people closer together. Each of the filmmakers felt like they had this responsibility to represent their whole culture or country — and do it well in case they might not get another chance to do it again — but when they saw each other’s films, there was only pride and respect.
The incredible thing was also how much we learned about each other’s cultures from the experience. There is so much more to unpack, as so much of Africa has never been represented or explored. Along with Tendayi Nyeke, I was across every aspect of every film from pitch to post-production, checking each asset and every draft or shot multiple times over, so it was a real pleasure to see how each film evolved through the process and yet retained each of the directors’ distinct voices. And of course, we had the incredible Peter Ramsey guiding us and the directors, as well the super team at Disney EMEA, so it was a huge opportunity to learn from their experience, which was also very rewarding.
What would you say are the biggest challenges of working on anthology shows like Star Wars: Visions and Kizazi Moto?
Working across Africa comes with a unique set of challenges — power cuts being just one of them, but we are used to being resourceful and remaining flexible. The whole project was such a learning curve for everyone involved at almost every level, and there were so many challenges, everything from matching the right studios or creatives teams together, to working in multiple foreign currencies — but ultimately the main challenge is still how to tell a good story in 10 minutes. As you can tell from the run time of some of them, that was still tough to do, but I’m immensely proud of how each of the shorts introduce audiences to unique worlds and memorable characters that many (on social media at least) have said they want to see more of. There’s a lot of story packed into each short, but they are still self-contained and layered, and I just tell people to watch them again, because there is no doubt more to discover.
Another challenge is still always going to be the marketing and distribution, because the home audience who want to watch the films don’t always have access to Disney+. That’s why it’s also so exciting that Kizazi Moto is going to be screened on Disney Channel across Africa, which will give it a far wider audience on the continent.
Why do you think 2023 has become such a watershed year for African animation?
We’re seeing the result of the Black Panther effect, that started gaining momentum in 2018 when the movie crossed $1.3 billion at the box office. At that time, we suddenly had an interest in African product that had never been there before. A lot of deals were done in late 2018 which are coming into fruition this year and next year. Hopefully this helps to create a tipping point and opens the floodgates for more productions from Africa, especially since so many more artists on or from the continent now have had experience working on a project of this scale. It’s not like we weren’t all trying to tell our stories before this for many years; it’s just that the rest of the world finally woke up to the fact that we exist and that there might even be a business case in giving audiences something fresh.
Tell us a bit about your studio’s Story Lab initiative. How do you see it helping the animation landscape in the region?
The Triggerfish Story Lab helped kickstart a few things. Firstly, just being able to publicize the opportunity across the continent helped to raise awareness about the industry as a whole, starting to get people to think about the possibilities of working in the medium. For example, the creator of Supa Team 4, Malenga Mulendema, was a journalist and now she has her own show on Netflix that is set in her home city of Lusaka [Zambia]. Audiences that grow up watching her characters will hopefully be inspired to work in and tell their own stories in animation in the future too. And it’s the same for all of these productions — each one likely will have a huge ripple impact we’ll only see in another decade.
Orion Ross, VP animation at Disney EMEA, came to Cape Town in 2015 and gave the whole room of shortlisted candidates a masterclass in developing animated TV shows over a couple of days, so even the people whose projects were not selected still got tools to take forwards on their journey — and to share with others. The industry here is very collaborative, the African idea of one’s own successes being able to help elevate the whole community has been shown to be true in a very practical way, with many artists banding together to try and create something bigger. South Africa’s own industry organization Animation SA has been running since 2003 so we have a head start, but there are now industry organizations or groups that have started up in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania, among others.
What is your take on the state of animation worldwide?
There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment, and that can mean less risk-appetite generally, so it’s possible a project like Kizazi Moto would not have happened today. It seems like no one knows what to do, or what will be a success, so they are all just locking down on known IP and brands, but perhaps that can also mean an opportunity to do something different, because there’s still a whole world outside of the U.S. and the next wave of positive disruption will come, so we have to make sure we’re ready for it.
Where do you see Triggerfish in the next few years?
We have a large slate of projects in development, some of them with partners, so we will be producing more of our own content. We are raising funds for our own slate, in addition to our service work facility. The studio is evolving and expanding. We’ve gone fully remote and have become a global company, with offices in both Cape Town and Galway, working with artists from across the world. Our company vision is to partner with artists to provide a platform for them to tell their own stories and bring them to global audiences, and at least for now, our focus is still on stories from Africa, because we’re very excited about the fresh storytelling that is developing across the continent.
We’re also expanding outside of animation into several new business areas, including graphic novels and live action. My own graphic novel, Pearl of the Sea, which I co-wrote with Raffaella Delle Donne and Willem Samuel, was released last year, and we are busy developing a couple more, so we’re also excited to explore this medium as a way to tell — and test — more stories.
For more information, visit triggerfish.com.
