Director Joey Clift Captures an Indigenous Adolescent Experience in His Award-Winning Short ‘Pow!’

This article was written for the January ’26 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 355).

Joey Clift’s charming animated short Pow! centers on a young Native American boy who tries to charge his video game console at a large powwow. The well-received project has been lauded for its authentic subject matter and unique mix of animation styles (16-bit pixel art, hand-drawn 2D and a sequence inspired by Plains Indian ledger art). 

Made by a largely Indigenous crew and featuring an all Native voice cast, the short won the Best Animated Short prize at the Yucca Valley Film Festival, and is now under Academy voter consideration. Today, the short made its debut through FNX – First Nations Experience, which is streaming and broadcasting the short as well as a making-of featurette titled Behind the Powwow. 

“I’m really happy Pow! is premiering the week of American Thanksgiving,” Clift told Animation Magazine. “This is one of the few times of year where Native people and culture are on people’s minds and my hope is that Pow! gives Natives and non-Natives an authentic, modern Native story to watch and share during the holiday week.”

Clift was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about Pow! via email recently and share the full short (watch it below).

Joey Clift: First off, thank you for the kind words! In my professional career, I write for a lot of popular cartoon series like PAW Patrol, Rubble & Crew, New Looney Tunes, Spirit Rangers and Molly of Denali. In my personal life, I’m an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe of Washington State and I grew up on the Tulalip reservation. I’m very proud of my North American Indigenous heritage, but I am rarely given the opportunity to tell big, funny stories about modern Indigenous people in the cartoons I’m hired to write.

The original idea for Pow! came about a few years ago when writing for a lot of these shows, wishing that I could tell a story like that with people like me at the center. Really, I just wanted to make a film that showed that a Native kid can be as funny as Bart Simpson. Animation is an expensive process, so Pow! existed only as an idea for a while, but after the success of my Comedy Central Digital series Gone Native, I was given the support to make it happen in late 2023 from a fantastic organization called Pop Culture Collaborative. We exported the final cut of the film in early 2025.

When did you realize you wanted to tell this story and why?

Pow! is loosely based on my experiences being dragged by my mom to powwows when I was a kid. I loved series like The Simpsons and Family Guy growing up, but because I didn’t see authentic Native American characters in the shows I liked, I didn’t think working in comedy or animation was something I was allowed to do.

In a lot of ways, Pow! is a story I’ve wanted to tell since I was that kid on the powwow bleachers playing Link’s Awakening on a battery powered Game Boy, not understanding why my mom brought me to this beautiful cultural event. I’ve dedicated a lot of my life to telling stories that I wish that kid had growing up, and that I’m glad kids from marginalized communities can have today. There wasn’t one moment when I realized I wanted to tell this story, it’s more a culmination of the past several decades of my personal and professional lives, intersecting in this silly, but very Native short.

Tell us how important it was for you to make sure people who helped you creatively with this project also had a direct connection with the powwow experience?

It was important that I put the Pow! team together with intentionality for a few different reasons. One, Native television shows and films have historically been made without Native people involved. Stories are often told about us, but without us. I felt that deeply in the cartoons I watched growing up, where the only Native characters I saw were stereotypes like Apache Chief from The Super Friends, or old Looney Tunes shorts featuring Bugs Bunny in a cowboy hat shooting at “savage” Native stereotypes. I sincerely doubt that they had any Native folks working on those productions because if they did, that person would have probably brought up how broad and cringe it all was.

Pow! is a really specific film. It’s one of the first films in North American animation to take place at a Coastal Salish intertribal powwow, to feature a sequence inspired by ledger art animation and to have a comedic runner where a frybread cook keeps accidentally dropping things into a frier.

Though this film is mostly a comedy, it delves into serious issues like Native activism, boarding schools, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the history of genocide and forced erasure the United States has thrust upon its Indigenous population. Though we had a team of consultants to make sure all cultural aspects of the film were accurate, I needed a sound designer who actually knew what a powwow sounded like, a composer who would understand directions like how I wanted the soundtrack to sound like Redbone meets old SNES JRPGs, I needed a background designer who understood why I wanted so many beaded iPhone cases, Pepsi bottles and Pendleton blankets in the background of every shot.

Pow! had a largely Indigenous team working on it and an all-Native voice cast partly because I know a lot of talented Native people in animation, and partly because for this film to work, it needed to feel Indigenous as hell, and I don’t think a non-Native team would understand the nuance of what that means. And the Native members of our team are extremely accomplished! Vera Starbard, one of our consulting producers, was just nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on Molly of Denali. Morgan Thompson, one of our main artists won an Annie Award for her student film The Fox & The Pigeon. Our sound designer Jeff Carpenter is one of the sound designers for the Diablo franchise.

I brought these artists in because they can tell Native stories from an authentic and personal place, but also because they’re some of the most talented people working in animation today!

What would you say was the toughest aspect of making Pow!?

Native filmmakers don’t often receive the funding and support necessary to make big theatrical comedy short films. Being given the opportunity to make Pow! was a gift and I put a lot of pressure on myself to honor that gift.

What that meant in practice is, I said yes to a lot of really hard ideas, because I knew that, though they would take a lot of work to pull off, they would also be cool and meaningful to include. One example is our ledger art flashback sequence about halfway through the film. Ledger art is a Plains Native art style originated in the 1800s. Basically, when Native folks were forced onto reservations by the United States military, the soldiers left behind their military ledgers filled with their military notes. For the Native folks on these reservations, that was the only paper they had so they picked up these ledgers and drew art pieces on top of these notes, literally using art to heal their trauma.

When we chose to animate that sequence as ledger art, it was important to me that the documents the animation rested on top of were treaties and artifacts important to the history of Native activism. Things like the Treaty of Fort Laramie, documents from the Alcatraz occupation and a page from the ledger of Haskell Indian School. To source these documents, I had to receive permission from the National Archives and several museums and colleges. At the end of that sequence, we even include actual audio from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of the 2010s. It took months for me to track down and receive the right approvals to use that audio for something that is really only in the film for a few seconds, but it was important for me to go the extra mile whenever possible.

Promoting the short during award season is a full-time job, right?

Oh god. It’s so grueling. Pow! has screened in over 60 film festivals and additionally, had dozens of screenings for small tribal communities over the past seven months or so. In the first two weeks of the film’s festival run, I traveled 23,000 miles to attend our various premieres. The circumference of the Earth is 24,000 miles. Even now, I’m writing this on a Friday night in a dusty old hotel room in Virginia. Tomorrow I’ve got nine hours of travel to make it in time for a screening in Los Angeles on Sunday morning.

We’ve been fortunate to screen at a lot of great festivals, like Palm Springs ShortFest, Seattle International Film Festival and Sidewalk Film Festival, where we took home the Best Animated Short Award. Outside of festivals, we screened at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, in front of thousands of people at a Macklemore concert in South Dakota on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and just a few days ago we were invited to screen at Los Angeles City Hall for the mayor’s staff.

Touring around a film is a lot of work, but I feel fortunate to have so many people want to see something that is so personal to me. It’s hard, but I would be lying to you if I didn’t also say that it is an extreme blessing to get to do this.

What has been the most memorable, moving reaction to Pow!?

I’ve had so many great experiences screening Pow! around the world and there are too many highlights to name, but here are a few that come to mind:

A major goal of the film is to honor the Native activists whose decades of struggle made it possible for us to celebrate our culture. Legendary Native rights activist Leonard Peltier was at the South Dakota screening of Pow!, and I heard afterwards that he really enjoyed it, which was just so cool!

When I was accepted into Seattle International Film Festival, they scheduled a screening on the reservation I grew up on, in a tribal cultural center just two blocks from the house I lived in as a kid. It was the first time my mom was able to see one of my film screenings in person. To be able to thank the community that inspired the film in front of so many friends and family members wasn’t just a career highlight, it was a life highlight.

Another highlight is, I’ve become friends with a lot of other fantastic Native filmmakers. We’ve tried to use our platforms to not just amplify our own projects, but to amplify each other’s work too. Just a few days ago, I held a joint screening with my film, the live-action short Courage and the documentary short Tiger at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles. We’re all vying for major awards in different categories. This is one of the first times so many Native made films are in a position to compete for these awards. We drew a huge, sellout crowd of people all cheering on our awards campaigns and it’s amazing that we were able to do that together.

More broadly, I’ve really appreciated how universal the response to Pow! has been. It’s a very Native film, but I’ve screened it everywhere, from international audiences in New Zealand who don’t know about the specific struggles of North American Indigenous people, to non-Native comedy audiences in New York City, to big indie film fan audiences at big festivals all over the continent, to screenings in front of small tribal communities away from major cities. What’s so cool about these screenings is, no matter how Native, non-Native or international the audience is, the laughs are in all of the same places and the emotional reactions are all in the same places.

It’s just so validating to see a story that might seem niche, have such broad appeal. It turns out, Native stories are universal!

Biggest animation hero?

I owe the development of my comedic voice to Matt Groening, Conan O’Brien and the golden age Simpsons writers’ room. I used to record Simpsons episodes on VHS every Sunday night and then I’d spend the week re-watching that episode on a loop, eventually wearing out the tape. Doing that for several years has infused the comedic rhythm of Bart, Homer, Marge and Lisa into my bones.

I really loved Hideaki Anno‘s Neon Genesis Evangelion and the works of Don Hertzfeldt growing up. They really expanded for me what animation is capable of as an artform.

Nowadays, I’m a big fan of Genndy Tartakovsky for creating animated series like Primal that are really the peak of the form, Spirit Rangers creator Karissa Valencia for giving us a roadmap for how to tell Native stories in animation the right way and The Mitchells vs. the Machines director Michael Rianda for all he’s done to advocate for animation workers through his involvement in The Animation Guild.

I have to shout out former Simpson’s writer Donick Cary. He is an executive producer on Pow! and I really owe him for helping develop not just the film, but for mentoring me as a comedic talent over these past few years.

I’m at a point where a lot of my heroes growing up are now my peers, and that’s so weird — but also so neat!

Tell us how FlickerLab got involved with your project?

FlickerLab is such a fantastic animation studio and I truly could not have made this film without them. During the pandemic, FlickerLab founder Harold Moss and I became friends over social media, mutually bonding over internet memes and dumb comedy bits.

As things reopened, we had the opportunity to work together on a few animated comedy pilot presentations and I really appreciated how artist friendly FlickerLab are as collaborators. After those pilots wrapped, we kept in touch. When I was putting the Pow! team together, Harold was one of my first calls. I can’t recommend them enough as an animation company and also as good, nice, talented people.

Best video game ever made — or, which one would you love to jump into?

Oh god, of all time!? That’s so much pressure! I love the Mother series. Pow!’s first scene is actually inspired by the second Mother game, Earthbound. Metal Gear Solid 3 is to me, one of the greatest stories ever told in video games. My favorite is probably Final Fantasy VI. I loved that game so much as a kid that my first piece of creative writing in elementary school was straight up Final Fantasy III/VI fan fiction.

There’s a lot of great stuff happening in the indie game space. If you’re looking for recommendations of fun and interesting games to check out, the top 10 that immediately come to mind are Lisa: The Painful, Papers Please, FTL, Rimworld, Darkest Dungeon, Terminus: Zombie Survivors, Convoy, Death Road to Canada, Into the Breach and Far: Lone Sails / Far: Changing Tides.

What’s next for Joey Clift?

When I’m not traveling to film festivals, I’m currently writing on the Nickelodeon series Rubble & Crew! I also sold a book to a publisher that I’m in the process of writing. It’s a satire book about Native American history, sort of like if The Onion or The Daily Show wrote a book about Indian Country, and it should be out in Fall 2026. I’m also appearing here and there on the streaming service Dropout. Check me out on the most recent season of Um, Actually!

Pow! premieres today on FNX – First Nations Experience platforms across broadcast, the FNX app and YouTube. The film is also available to Oscars voters in the Academy Screening Room. Learn more at gonenative.tv/pow.