The majority of Disney’s animated shows are produced by Disney Television Animation, but Iwaju is a different beast altogether. Not only does it take advantage of animation you’d think to see in a high-budget Pixar film, its six episodes also intend to weave a serialised yarn as it drops on Disney+ later this week, born from a partnership between the House of Mouse and Pan-African entertainment company Kugali Media.
Iwaju takes us to a futuristic vision of Nigeria, to the capital of Lagos, where ingrained parts of its culture combine with futuristic technology across a societal divide that will be all too familiar to those who know the country. Yet it is also gorgeous, charming, and filled with a depth that I came to appreciate, especially as someone who has never been there myself.
“It really comes from a place of authenticity,” director Olufikayo Ziki Adeola tells me. “All the stories we tell, we want them to either be authentic to some sort of African experience or authentic to the world that we’re trying to represent. And because Iwaju is based on Lagos in Nigeria, and very much rooted in modern day Lagos, all of these things that you mention are a part of the Lagos experience. It’s so important for us to make the story feel authentic.”
Iwaju follows a young girl called Tola as she celebrates her 10th birthday. She lives a lavish life in a lovely house where automated robots abide by her every whim. But all the spoils in the world can’t make up for a workaholic father who clearly loves his daughter, but neglects her to pursue progressive yet lofty technological ambitions at work. The series’ first episode has Tola taking a trip into the city to meet her father at the airport, where she is greeted by a metropolis that is technologically astounding, but still defined by economic disparity and corporate business practices that see a large percentage of the population struggling to make ends meet. It’s a surprisingly political and accurate rendition of this city, and as Adeola describes, is unflinchingly authentic in spite of its colourful presentation.
“Human beings have always been human beings for I don’t know how many years, and we’ll always be human beings in the future as well” - Production Designer Hamid Ibrahim
“Lagos, in real life, has an island and a mainland,” cultural consultant Tolu Olowofoyeku adds. “That’s real, so we just took the actual setting and exaggerated some things while adding a number of futuristic elements.”
Production designer Hamid Ibrahim also chimes in: “If you are creating a new world based on an existing world and bring it to the future and want to make it believable, you have to capture all of the nuances. And human beings have always been human beings for I don’t know how many years, and we’ll always be human beings in the future as well. There is a way the world has kept on developing, and [Iwaju] is an extension of that.”
We also touch on the advancement of technology at a rapid pace in the current climate, and whether Iwaju wanted to comment on the direction things are headed, or aim for a stylishly idyllic vision of the future within the confines of Lagos.
“When you’re looking in terms of creating a new world in the future,“ Ibrahim notes. “You can predict the future by looking at the past, history teaches us about the future. If you’d look 100 years back at things that happened over and over again every 100 years, most likely in the next 100 years something like that is going to happen again. That’s how you build a realistic future, because people instinctively understand that.”
As for today’s current technology debate, Ibrahim tells me, “We didn’t dig into the giant AI questions around, and I know we’re artists, but we focused more on day-to-day living and aspects like that. I grew up in Uganda and I didn’t have my first phone until I was 16, but if you talk to my little sister who was born in the UK, she can’t imagine a life before phones or the internet. As for us, that was a natural thing, and human beings tend to adapt very quickly. So even if AI comes and does all of this, human beings will adapt.”
But asidefrom the depiction of technology, Adeola stresses that Iwaju is intended as both an authentic and fun animated adventure that viewers can read into as much as they’d like, as it carries a clear, powerful message: “The most important thing for me, with respect to this story was that it was recognisable to anyone who knows anything about Lagos. That’s the angle I am going for from the perspective of cultural authenticity. However, at the same time, this is an animated show that people have fun watching.”
All six episodes of Iwaju come to Disney+ on February 28th