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My name is Amin Bahari
and I love animation.
I remember how I used to watch animation when I was a little kid
and dreaming one day I would create my own.
Of course then, it wasn't feasible for me
but for some reason, that did not stop me.
I wanted to tell a story so bad that I turned to comics.
I created my first comic story when I was 6.
The main character of which was a super hero called "Rami".
Rami fought evil, he brought villains to justice, which was great,
but I guess the question that I never asked myself then was:
why did Rami fly?
Why did Rami wear a cape?
And more importantly, what was he thinking wearing his underwear on the outside?
You would think that I never asked myself these questions then because I was too young,
but actually I never asked these questions until a few years ago.
You see, I grew up in Saudia Arabia.
My father - may he rest in peace - was a college professor at King Faisal's University,
and we didn't have satellite TVs then,
but living in the Eastern region of Saudia Arabia at the time was an advantage
because we had access to more TV channels than those living in Riyadh for instance.
And necessarily more TVs meant more cartoons.
Our TVs would pick up Aramco TV, Bahrain TV, Qatari TV,
and if the weather was really good,
we would be able to watch cartoons in Persian.
Of course we didn't understand what they were saying
but we didn't understand the American ones either.
I guess the language didn't matter, if it was animation I was watching it.
And then anime, Japanese anime invaded TV.
Now Japanese was different than contemporary and classical American animation,
and it has a certain appeal to it that made it very popular very fast.
I remember how I used to watch anime on our VCR
and pause it at a certain frame
then starting to copy the characters on a piece of paper.
Now that period of my life witnessed a significant shift in my drawing style.
And after that, in 1991, my father passed away - may he rest in peace - and we moved back to Sudan.
I continued to create comics.
My style then had become fully Japanese.
And I became fully a manga artist.
But I guess the question that I still never asked myself was,
why my characters' eyes were so big,
or why they had very sharp chins,
or why my stories took place in really undefined areas?
I then went into medical school, I qualified and then I moved out of Sudan to continue my medical training.
And that was a turning point, that was THE turning point.
I found myself for the very first time on my own,
in a strange land where I was a foreigner.
And for somebody who once "believed" he was universal,
the feeling and being treated as a foreigner was all it took for me to start asking the questions
that I never asked before.
Who am I?
How come a Sudanese artist with no connection to Japan whatsoever
become a manga artist?
How come a Sudanese man who never set foot in America
or received any sort of foreign education
speak English with a North American accent?
How did this all happen?
and it hit me:
the answer to all my questions lied in one simple word:
media.
It's what I've been watching all along;
it's what I've been fed through media that shaped my perception
of how people should look like,
and act like and talk like,
and at that particular moment I remember a conversation I had with my older brother.
[Arabic] He criticized how my characters looked.
And my response to him at the time was something that I would like to share here
just to demonstrate how powerful the influence of the media is.
I told him, you're wrong.
Manga is universal, the style is originally Japanese but they don't look like any certain people;
their eyes are bigger, they're taller,
manga is universal.
You see, I was so convinced that what I was doing was the norm and everybody else was wrong,
not only that, but I ready to fiercely defend it.
And then I started asking myself, who am I?
and the obvious answer is I'm Sudanese,
so I started looking up on... start reading up on Sudan,
its history, its culture, its people,
and looking up pictures from different parts of Sudan,
and honestly I learned a lot.
I learned that we have very rich culture and heritage that have been poorly promoted
and overshadowed by all the negative pictures we see in the international media.
And that wasn't good enough.
I felt something had to be done.
Hmm, I guess at the back of my mind, I was thinking about that 6-year-old who is probably, as we speak,
is drawing yet another character that looks like Superman.
I knew something had to be done at a larger scale.
I just didn't know what it was.
Until march 2011,
when I created Tartar Studio which is a Youtube-based non-profit animation studio
with a mission to promote Sudan's culture and tradition through the production of animated videos.
In Tartar I focused on two things: quality and local content,
because I knew what I was up against.
I knew I did not have the experience.
I knew I did not have the formal education in film or animation
but I believed in my talent.
I believed in the positive message Tartar has to offer
and I believed in our culture and traditions
(Applause)
Thanks.
And I produced 7 videos so far, one of which has been screened at 2 international film festivals,
and the other one was a Youtube viral video,
that received hundred thousand views within a short period of one week.
And the title of which..
(Applause) Thanks.
And the title of which has become a catch phrase.
Tartar has grown to become more than just an online animation studio run entirely by one person.
Our fan base is growing larger by the day.
People from all sorts of fields are coming forward to help:
graphic designers, script writers, actors and actresses, they're all volunteering to help
without expecting anything in return.
Tartar has become more of a community
where everybody who comments on or shares any of our videos
is essentially contributing to the growth of that community,
But with the all the success and exposure Tartar has received in the very short period of a year,
I still felt something was missing;
rather someone was missing.
That 6 year-old-boy, who is probably as we speak again is drawing yet another character
that looks like Spiderman.
And I realized for this to effectively achieve its objective, it has to start at a very young age,
before the snowball becomes too big to be stopped.
And before... he doesn't have, this kid doesn't have to wait until he is my age
to realize how detached he was.
So I started thinking, what do kids like?
They like fairy tales.
Simple, I would just animate our own fairy tales.
But do we have any?
We must have, but I just didn't know them because I didn't watch them,
because apparently nobody animated them.
So I started looking further and it turns out yes, yes, it was true nobody animated them.
So they all heard it from their grandmothers, which makes sense.
One grandmother passed away when I was in Saudi,
and the other one passed away soon after we moved back from Sudan,
may they both rest in peace.
I started then looking further into it and I stumbled upon the most amazing book,
by the late professor Abdullah Al-Tayib.
Professor Al-Tayib toured Sudan. He collected all these..
(Applause)
He collected all these folk tales and put them all in one book he called "Sudanese Stories".
The English version of it is titled "Stories from the Sands of Africa".
So my plan was,
I would just animate these 16 stories.
And so I started reading the book, but by the time I finished the book I was shocked.
I was litteraly shocked.
I put the book down, convinced that this... no way, this cannot be animated.
The stories are full of violence, heads being chopped off, children being eaten and burnt alive,
and not to mention the abundance of slavery references.
(Applause)
And one story, at some point, there was a witch, old witch, squeezing poison out of her breast.
So I was, like, seriously, how do you animate that?
Even "Fatima Al Samha" who is meant to be the equivalent, Sudanese equivalent of Cinderella,
turns out not to be as nice as I thought.
Fatima Al Samha, who is in the stories on the run, bumps into an old man
who just happened, he just happened to be passing by and skins him --
Yes, Fatima Al Samha skins an old man to wear his skin as disguise.
So I concluded that our fairy tales apparently are not child-friendly.
But I didn't give up, even at that point.
And as I was contemplating whether I should really go ahead with this project,
I came across two important facts.
Number one: folklorists tell us that fairy tales or folk tales were not originally meant
exclusively for children.
And this association between folk tales and children did not appear until a few centuries back.
The other fact is that even the fairy tales we know today, the likes of Cinderella and Red Riding Hood,
have been edited, to look the way they look today.
For instance, Rapunzel. We all know the story.
There were *** references removed from that story.
And much of violence as well removed from other stories.
And that was a happy moment.
I concluded again that actually there's nothing wrong with our fairy tales,
they're just centuries back in their evolution process.
And that was very, very pleasing,
because it alleviated any feeling of guilt that would have been associated with
editing these stories.
Now I can go ahead and edit them,
remove all the violence, remove all the slavery references and add twists
without altering significantly the original plot.
This is a big project,
it's a big challenge,
but big challenges did not stop me when I was a single person doing this.
A year later, I'm still an emergency medicine trainee who works 10-12 hour shifts,
and I still animate.
A year later, I am backed by numerous patriotic, enthusiastic, positive Sudanese
who are determined to make this project see the light,
who have decided it's about time we stop complaining about foreign media
and use media to empower ourselves.
It's about time that 6-year-old draws a character inspired from his own environment.
It's about time we break the cycle.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)