The second season of Star Wars: Visionspremiering this Thursday, eschews last season’s anime-exclusive format to showcase work from around the world by renowned studios like Aardman (Wallace & Gromit) and Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers). If this approach whets your appetite for more great world animation, don’t worry, a new animated series of Afrofuturist-inspired shorts will premiere on Disney Plus later this summer.
Produced by Peter Ramsey, co-director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is an animated anthology dedicated to imagining the future from an African perspective. The first teaser trailer for the series quietly dropped on YouTube earlier this week, offering an impressive first glimpse at this stunning new collection of sci-fi fantasy animation.
Image: Disney
“I am thrilled to be part of a groundbreaking, fresh and exciting project aimed at exposing the world to a whole new wave of creativity and ingenuity from a place that is just about to explode into the world animation scene,” Ramsey said in a statement when the series was first announced in 2021.
“The films in the anthology vary quite a bit when it comes to science fiction,” he added. “There are stories that touch on other worlds, time travel and aliens, but all these genre conventions are seen through an African lens, making them totally new. I can’t wait for people to go crazy and say, ‘I want more!’”
The 10-part anthology features work by emerging animation talent from six African countries. The process of curating and selecting the talent to contribute Kizazi Moto was supervised by the team at Triggerfish, the South African studio behind the Star Wars: Visions season 2 short “Aau’s Song.” Triggerfish will be the lead studio for creating the anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire the studio’s second joint production for Disney.
Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire will stream on Disney Plus this summer.