Embracing Arab Animation

In February this year, Malik Nejer, 25, a Saudi maker of animated video, created a YouTube channel for his work that has since become the No. 4 subscribed YouTube channel in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Nejer also has more than 80,000 followers on Twitter. He has set up an animated video company, AD Production, with financing from young fellow Saudis and is expanding his business to include the production of commercials and other projects.

“The money I have made in the last 9 months online is triple what we made from working 10 months on similar animation projects for television,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

A natural disaster two years ago gave Mr. Nejer his break in the animation business. The 2009 flood that swept Jidda, killing more than 100 people, prompted him to make a short, satirical animated clip, “The Real Reason Behind the Jidda Disaster.” The sketch, featuring a government official who falls in love with, and marries, his chair, went viral.

MBC, a Saudi-owned television group, called him with a job offer, so he quit his advertising job.

The rise in interest in Arab animation is a recent development. But the demand for original Arabic content is fueling more investment in an industry once looked upon as a children’s play space, rather than a money-making, cross-generational genre.

Online Arab creativity has also been galvanized by high Internet and mobile penetration, affordable Internet and cellphone services, censorship in traditional media outlets and the fact that most of the world’s 300 million Arabs are tech-savvy youths who scour the Internet for content that piques their interests.

“There is still some resistance in the market, especially from traditional broadcasters,” Badih Fattouh, the MBC group director in Dubai for content, said this month in a telephone interview. “However, they are going to be more aware of this genre, especially that the business model is changing. There are more revenue streams that could be generated around this animation, other than the traditional sponsorship or television spots and this should give more room for growth.”

MBC, which commissioned Sketch-in-Motion, an animation studio in Amman, to produce a short series about a Bedouin tribe called Al Masageel, is talking to the company about a longer second season.

Mr. Nejer’s success is helped by Saudi Arabia’s brand of Islam, which bans cinemas, segregates the sexes and imposes censorship on the news media.

“YouTube is becoming more successful in Saudi Arabia, and people are creating more genuine content because we have nothing else to do,” he said. “This kind of helped create traffic.”

Across the Middle East and North Africa, there are more than 100 million daily hits on YouTube videos, said Najeeb Jarrar, product marketing manager for the region at Google, which owns YouTube.

“Because the content is so creative, television and big old traditional media have started approaching that content,” Mr. Jarrar said in a recent interview. “The cheaper the Internet becomes in more countries, you will have more users consuming more content.”

In the United Arab Emirates, Freej, a 3-D animated comedy series about a squad of four Emirati grandmothers, has evolved from a superhero idea that came to its creator, Mohammed Harib, while he was studying in the United States. The show, which had its debut on Dubai television in 2006, is now in its fourth season. Freej also started broadcasting last year on the Cartoon Network Arabic, part of to Turner Broadcasting System, a Time Warner unit also known as TBS.

“When we sat down and we did the business plan for the company, this was never factored in, this was a bonus; We couldn’t have imagined something like this could go global because of the severe locality of it,” Mr. Harib said in an interview this month. “There was a lot of thirst for culture especially in a place like the U.A.E., where globalization was taking over and the new generation didn’t have any link to our way of life.”

Mr. Harib also founded Lammtara Pictures, which produces Freej. Freej has become a full-fledged business, including using product placement, merchandising, theatrical shows and events. Plans for a theme park were delayed after the Dubai real estate crash in 2008. The success of Freej, meanwhile, has spawned another Emirati animation series, Shabiat al Cartoon.

TBS, which has also signed the Jordanian animated production “Ben and Izzy,” is scouting the region for more Arab content to help shift its content balance away from global franchises over the next five years.

“There are two ideas that we are developing towards potential pilot stage, which are very interesting,” Alan Musa, TBS general manager and vice president whose responsibility includes the Middle East and Africa, said in a telephone interview. “I’m confident we can find one or two shows we can produce or co-produce and that these shows will potentially work in other markets as well.”

Platforms like the Cartoon Network Arabic in Dubai, Al Jazeera Children’s Channel in Qatar and Al Jazeera’s preschool children’s channel Baraem TV should help aspiring animators find work in a region that has not traditionally fostered local talent. TBS has also joined with twofour54, an Abu Dhabi government multimedia organization and zone, to offer animation courses in Abu Dhabi at the Cartoon Network Animation Academy, whose first batch of students graduated in September.

These initiatives, though, remain few and far between. Mohammad Fikree, a 21-year-old student majoring in animation in Dubai, says he is already thinking of opening his own studio after he graduates next year. His short animation, “Mad Camel,” made it to the U.A.E. section in this year’s Cannes Short Film Corner, but he is facing difficulties in getting support to develop his work.

“There is actually a lot of Arab talent, but no one is giving them a chance to show it in public,” Mr. Fikree, said in a recent interview. “To have an animation industry here in Dubai, you need sponsorship by the government.”

By Dania SAADI – Published inNY Times

A version of this article appeared in print on October 27, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Embracing Arab Animation.