Iwájú: A Day Ahead

What I loved about them from the minute I saw the video,

I knew they were driven.

I knew they were artists. I knew they were passionate.

They had this incredible, goal.

And they were making it happen.

You just called out the grandaddy of visual entertainment.

This is absolutely groundbreaking.

We had never done anything like that before.

Iwájú is set in Lagos, Nigeria.

Lagos has a certain audacity as a place.

Look at you smiling. You know! You know you're giving me a high price!

There's a way it just wills itself to be what it wants to be.

I want people to see the good, the bad, the ugly. You know, all the quirks.

Puff puff!

We've tried to be authentic in every layer.

You know, I've been living in Lagos all my life.

The indigo fabric is special to Nigeria.

The voices you're going to hear are homegrown.

She's pretty much me in animated form.

This is not us making up a world.

This is us doing our best to portray a very real world.

Seeing the story come to life…

It was just really the three of us who had a dream that we believed in

and worked very hard.

There is that weight of responsibility.

What if I fail?

As an African mam, drawing or doing art is nothing.

That's Nigerian mentality.

But I think it's important to take a leap of faith.

We run the show here.

No. You don't wanna work with me anymore, Ziki?

Love me, come on!

- I'm starting to see how big it will be. - Are you ready for Africa?

Yeah!

Iwájú is actually inspired by a story that happened to a friend of mine.

She was driving back home from the airport one day

and suddenly armed men tried to block her car and she did something crazy.

She jumped into the water and… …she was actually able to swim to safety.

So I always knew that I wanted to revisit that story at some point.

But "some point" came a lot sooner than I thought it would

in a way that I never saw coming.

I talk a lot about Walt Disney's belief

that we should be evolving as storytellers all the time. I think about it a lot.

I remember meeting with Bob Iger when I accepted this role

and his permission to be fearless.

I set a goal right away,

which is that I want us to not just tell the stories of the world,

but by the people of the world.

And I really was excited to connect with artists from around the world,

and do kinds of collaborations we'd never done before.

Jenn and I had a meeting and we were talking about the studio

and, really, her vision for it.

And she started to go into an example of where she had read this article

about this comic book company in Africa.

I was lying in bed one morning

and every morning, I read the news on my phone,

and I go to the different newspapers,

and I was on the BBC and they had this headline, um,

"Pan-African comic book company wants to kick Disney's…" you-know.

So I was like, "This looks fun."

I think that there is a sort of cultural revolution at the moment.

People are hungry for content from other sources.

There's an opportunity for them…

It was a video,

and so I got to see the guys, I got to see their love of comics,

their love of recognizing all the different artists across Africa

in the different countries, and their different kinds of stories,

and wanting to make sure the world, um, saw those stories.

Most of what you find out there about Africa

is being told by non-Africans

and it was very important to us that Africans tell their own stories.

This is incredible. This is exactly what we do. It's all about storytelling.

Jenn Lee came bursting into the Frozen II production pod,

and she was, like, "I was list-- I read this interview of this--

Have you heard of this company Kugali?"

and she was just talking, talking, talking. I was like,

"Slow down. What are you saying?"

And she was like, "I read this interview with this company, and this one guy said…"

We're gonna kick Disney's a** in Africa.

I know that's gonna happen.

He wasn't saying it as a joke. He was saying it sincerely.

And it intrigued me so much. And she said, "What do you think?"

And I said, "Well, I think we pick up the phone."

- Used to be Kugali's… - It started with Tolu and I,

who had known each other since primary school.

We were those kids who would always watch anime

play video games, watch superhero content, read comics,

but we're from Nigeria. We're Nigerian.

Everything we watch is American and Japanese.

Where's the Nigerian, um, content?

There was a comic con in Lagos, here in Freedom Park,

and when I came here and I saw a small group of creators creating comics

that were inspired by our own culture, mythology and folklore,

it was a lightbulb moment. I was like, "Okay!

This is new, this is original, and here's an opportunity."

Welcome to Kugali Spotlight

where we look at your favorite creators from across Africa and beyond.

We originally just started out as a podcast,

so it was just Ziki and I.

We added a blog, a YouTube channel.

I live in Lagos, he doesn't anymore. He spends way more time in the UK now.

Today I have Gbenle Maverick and Hafeez Oluwa, the co-creators of Orò …

And then it became clear that

what was needed was a company that could create a platform

for talented artists and storytellers to showcase their stories.

So we decided we'd transition to being a publisher

where we were bringing together some of these people we had discovered

and putting their work together with our own work.

You know, the quality of the work was world-class.

It's good quality by anybody's standards anywhere in the world.

I was not a big comic book person.

I read the popular comic books, but I had very bold visions,

there were things I really wanted to do.

In terms of Tolu and Ziki as a team,

it worked really well for me because, one, we're all very different personalities,

and we came from very different backgrounds,

and then from there,

the rest is history.

When Hamid and I first met, we were both living in London at the time.

He's from Uganda.

I was living with Ziki, so it was a little co-founders' house.

So, like, right there.

It's that building, but it's that window down over there.

I think we were sitting just by the living room.

An executive from Disney Animation reached out to us.

Just imagine you're sitting there, young creative, right?

You just called out the grandaddy of visual entertainment.

You just called them out and say you're gonna kick their a****.

And then somebody reaches out saying, "Hi,"

that they're from Disney, "Want to talk?"

First things first, you don't believe it's them.

You're like, "Pfft, can't be them."

So I was super-skeptical about the-- like, whether or not it was valid.

Then after that we're like, "Let's talk to them. Let's just see where it goes."

We said perhaps what we'll do is an anthology of shorts

that are from some of the comics, and we'll turn them into animation

and that was kind of our idea.

And, of course, they came in and said, "How about this instead?"

Iwájú is a futuristic sci-fi story set in Lagos, Nigeria,

about a young girl from the island,

which is the richer and more affluent part of Lagos,

that befriends a young boy from the mainland,

which is the poorer and less-developed part of the city.

But things get complicated

when a crime boss who runs a kidnapping ring decides to make her his next target.

Ziki really talked about how he wanted each episode

to focus on a different character

at the very beginning.

Olabode, why did you take that money?

Why?

I just loved it.

It's me, Omotola Abike Martins.

Tola is this aspirational young lady

who refuses to accept the world for the way it is and, rather,

wants to see it for how it should be.

And she ultimately inspires the people around her.

Let's see if that did it.

Tunde is Tola's father.

He is a wealthy tech executive.

Tunde's arc in the story is a journey of remembering where he came from.

My people. I am here for you?

Bode grew up in relatively poor circumstances

and so he developed a sort of Robin Hood complex,

but it's somewhat false because, you know, he just takes from the rich and

that's the end of the story.

Kole!

Madam.

Kole is Tola's best friend

and he's also born in relatively poor circumstances

where you're earning such little money

that it actually ends up pushing you further and further into poverty.

And so he's ultimately backed into a corner.

It really looked like a powerful series.

Long-form series. It is 20-- you know, 20-minute episodes.

We had never done anything like that before.

Disney Animation as a studio has done features,

and has done short films,

but we haven't actually done series here.

It just felt like, for all of us, it would give us something really new

to build together.

You know, Disney Animation has never partnered with an outside company

in its 100 years of filmmaking, and so this is absolutely groundbreaking.

Kugali, a full-on production of this scale

was, quite frankly, something that was a little bit out of our depth.

And is our creativity going to be swallowed by this behemoth?

But I think it's important to take a leap of faith.

Walt Disney himself believed in taking risks, innovating all the time,

and so I don't think that for a second

we said we can't take this risk, or shouldn't.

I have secretly dubbed this project, "the virgin suicides".

'Cause that's what it is! 'Cause it's like everybody's first time.

Everyone is a first-time leader,

and everyone wants to put their best foot forward.

Everyone's leaning on each other to amplify.

You were hired for a reason, I was hired for a reason.

We all know what we're doing individually

so how do we bring that collectively?

This is either gonna end really well

or it's gonna end really badly. Let's start by saying that, right?

Let's see what happens!