Disney’s first Nigerian animated series is a futuristic take on Lagos and its flaws

Iwaju, a limited animated series, will become Disney’s first feature set in Nigeria when it airs this week on the Disney+ streaming service.

Imagining a Lagos where flying cars zoom over today’s crowded street markets, the project is co-produced by Disney and Kugali media, a seven-year old comics and augmented reality outfit founded by two Nigerians, Olufikayo Adeola and Tolu Olowofoyeku, and Hamid Ibrahim, a Ugandan. The series follows a pre-teen girl, played by Simisola Gbadamosi, who comes of age in Lagos. It also features veteran and young Nigerian actors, including Weruche Opia of the BBC and HBO I May Destroy You miniseries, and 35-year-old Dayo Okeniyi who plays an over-protective tech entrepreneur father.

Raised in Lagos by a Nigerian father and Kenyan mother before moving to the U.S. at 15, Okeniyi’s credits include The Hunger Games in 2012, Apple TV+ series See, and Fresh on Hulu. In Rise, a 2022 Disney film about the Greek-Nigerian basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo, he played the athlete’s father. Okeniyi was approached again by Disney in 2021 for Iwaju and sees the series as a new standard for animation.

💡What does Iwaju set out to achieve? It’s a very optimistic look at Lagos — a version of our utopia, so to speak. But it doesn’t shy away from the socio-economic gaps within our society: the haves and have nots, the island versus mainland mentalities, examining how much of our culture will remain in a hundred years given Western influences today. And though a Disney animation would be assumed to be for children, there’s a lot of subtext in this for adults to watch and walk away with more than children would.

💡How did Disney attempt to get Nigerian culture right versus things like Hollywood’s generic ‘African’ accents? They were committed to getting Nigerian actors to voice everything, as opposed to training foreign actors to do accents. You hear a mix of our different languages and colloquialisms clearly. The creators also did not want to push too far into the future where things wouldn’t feel recognizable. It was about taking iconic aspects of the Lagos landscape and pushing them ever so slightly forward, with just a sprinkling of wish fulfillment. So public transportation and traffic but you add flying cars, the kind many of us wish we could have when stuck in Lagos ‘go slow.’

You still see wealth gaps in the windows that separate billionaires from street hawkers. A lot of animated shows put a gloss over everything, like showing the cleanest version of New York when the real city is dirty. People will throw stuff on the ground in a metropolitan city even 100 years from now. The difference is that you may then have androids as street sweepers instead of humans.

💡 Disney+ is not available in Nigeria, so who’s this film for? An extremely valid question we’re still dealing with. At the time I recorded my voice for Iwaju in 2022, I knew Disney+ had a campaign to go global as quickly as possible. I think with the writers’ and actors’ strikes last year, a lot of those endeavors got pushed down the line. But, look, there’s a huge diaspora of Nigerians in America, the U.K., China, all over the world. It is a story for Nigerians being told by Nigerians, mostly recorded in Nigeria.

💡How’s the roll-out leading up to Feb. 28 going? Disney’s direction has been to highlight the Kugali creators, how Iwaju has been the fulfillment of their lifelong passion. Obviously I would have loved for them to highlight the cast a bit more; it’s an influential cast with a strong fanbase. I think Disney has ridden very high on excitement because Nigeria hasn’t been represented in this way and the online chatter is encouraging. But I believe they could have done more in pushing this.

💡How was pay structured for this project? I feel I was decently well paid. Our industry isn’t transparent so you have no idea what the going rates for things like this are. I have no idea what my castmates were paid. Hollywood is behind sports on that. It should be more transparent. The part our industry actually needs to do a lot of work on is royalties. There’s a mentality to cut a check that looks nice upfront while the studios own the product forever, making money from it. My fight during last year’s strike was to see good residuals.

To be sure, the industry is changing from being based on advertising to subscription, and nothing beats advertising money. That said, I hope that as long as Iwaju is on Disney+ we should see great returns for years to come. When I signed on, the agreement was to receive a fee upfront and a lump sum royalty, but the industry is fighting back on that formula going forward.

💡 What’s the one thing that will boost African film for global reach Budget. That’s my criticism of streamers that come to tell Nigerian stories, Iwaju included. There’s an unspoken thing where projects for elsewhere get significantly more than African work. I think they can give more money to finance these projects. And promote them.

• Netflix launched its first-ever original African animated series last July. Supa Team 4 was produced by Zambian animators and was considered a significant milestone for a fledgling animation hub in Lusaka.