Animation is also a significant presence in Lebanese film and video, where university departments and courses in animation have notably been expanding. Lena Mehrej, who curated Lebanese animations for the Festival International de La Bande Dessinée, held in Beirut in 2003, has also been associated with Future TV, where Syrian-born, U.S.-educated Lina Ghaibeh has created most of her animation work and which periodically features short animations about political issues by Edgar Aho and Jad Khouri. Many Lebanese video artists employ animation techniques, particularly in conjunction with photographic or video material, evident in the work of Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Ali Cherri, Hisham Bizri, and Ziad Antar. Ely Dagher’s animated short Waves ’98, set against the background of the Lebanese Civil Wars, became the first Arab film to win the short film Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2015. Syrian animation, meanwhile, has been largely extinguished by the political crisis and violence there, with its erstwhile practitioners now either silenced or working outside the country—for example, Sulafa Hijazi (The Jasmine Birds [2009]). In Israel, in recent years, there has been considerable, well-funded development of digital technology, largely for intelligence purposes; however, the by-product of this has been a digital media boom that has facilitated film- and video-making by Israelis at lower production budgets, particularly animation, with the best-known and most widely distributed Israeli animation being the well-publicized hasbara film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). This feature-length war film analyzes an Israeli soldier’s struggle to come to terms with his participation in the Israel Defense Forces collaboration in the massive slaughter of Palestinians in the Sabra municipality and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982. The first Palestinian-produced animation film is Fatenah (Ahmad Habash, 2009). The Wanted 18 (Amer Somali/Paul Cowan, 2014), from the Zan Studio in Ramallah, is a hybrid live-action/animated documentary depicting a group of cows that is moved from a kibbutz to Bethlehem; it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was honored in Abu Dhabi. Animations produced by Zan and by Dimensions Studio, also Ramallah based, as well as by Zaitoon Studio, Afkartoon, Johatoon, and Shakhabeet Avatar—all Gaza based—have been referred to as examples of a “pixelated Intifada” for their role in projecting resistance to Israeli Occupation through critical appropriations of animation’s traditionally ludic phantasmagoria. Jordan’s two most prominent animators are Tariq Rimawi (Missing [2010]) and Mahmoud Hindawi (The Street Artist [2014]), both trained in Wales. Jordan has briefly hosted an animation festival, JoAnimate, focused on work from the region.
The first Algerian animation film, The Tree Party (1963), was the work of Mohamed Aram and is a plea to regrow vegetation destroyed in the just-finished war of liberation against France. Algeria hosted two animation festivals in 2012 and 2014, but Aram, who has continued to make films, mostly for television, remains the country’s only significant animator. Tunisian animation also began in the 1960s, through the pioneering work of Mongi Sancho (The Intelligent Dog [1966]). Originally self-taught, Sancho went on to study in Sofia at the Bulgarian National Center for Cinematography, where he made The Fez Seller in 1967; in the 1980s, Zouhair Mahjoub studied in Czechoslovakia, where he made The Water Seller (1984), a satirical critique of the Bourguiba regime. Both Sancho (Cunning Craftiness [2006]) and Mahjoub (The Carthage Submarine [1999]; The Miraculous Droplet [2009]) have remained active in the 21st century, joined by younger Tunisian animators such as Nadia Rais, previously an assistant to Mahjoub. Nacer Khemir began his work for the cinema as an animator, working in France in the early 1970s. Perhaps the most widely available examples of Maghrebi animation, however, are the animated sequences of Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (Nabil Ayouch, 1999), which provide an imagined better life for the street children of Casablanca. (Although they do not become part of the narrative world in the same way, the link by which animation provides an alternative environment for underprivileged children is also powerfully present in Ticket to Jerusalem [Rashid Masharawi, 2002], in which the protagonist screens animation films in Arabic to Palestinian children, many of them refugees.) The Meknès International Animation Festival (FICAM) begun in 2000, showing international work, but animation has received little support in Morocco. Hamid Semlali, who studied sculpture in Baghdad and film production in Prague, was perhaps the first significant figure there, making the shorts Didi, the Chicken (1984), Bobo, the Saviour (1988), Bobo and the Cheese (1990), and The Bird of the Atlas (2002), a rare example of an animated film that was partially funded by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain. Amine Beckoury’s Blad Skizo (2007), which uses plasticine characters, won Best African Short Film at FICAM in 2008; Beckoury subsequently completed Cuisine Jap (2010). The Maghreb is the setting for Azur and Asmar (2008) by well-established French animator Michel Ocelot, an early guest at FICAM. It tells the story of two boys, one French, one Maghrebi, who are separated by the independence struggle.
In the 21st century, as in other areas of the media, much funding and distribution of Arab animated films has originated with money and resources from the Gulf states, notably the Middle East Broadcasting Center Group in Dubai and the Cartoon Network Studios Arabia in Abu Dhabi. Animation series for distribution on the web now emanate from Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, where an animation course has been established at Effat University in Jeddah.
Iraqi-born, Germany-based Furat Al Jamil’s Baghdad Night (2013), the first Iraqi animation created by a woman, retells a folktale about a woman who lures a man into a graveyard. Iraqi-born, U.S.-based Usama Alshaibi’s five-minute digital animation Allahu Akbar (2003) uses complex and revolving geometric patterns similar to those traditionally used to represent the perfection of deity and as a substitute for the proscribed image of the Prophet in much Middle Eastern Islamic art and architecture. Paris-based, Moroccan-born Mounir Fatmi, who abandoned painting for the camera, includes somewhat similar digital animations in his work collected in Hard Head: Films of Mounir Fatmi (2008). By contrast, animation has played an important role in the orientalist portrayal of Arabs in Western films, from the world’s first feature-length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926), at least through the financially successful Disney-produced Aladdin (Ron Clements/John Musker, 1992). (The 2019 remake was a box-office flop.)
AOULAD-SYAD (OULAD SAYED), DAOUD (1953–)
A prolific French Moroccan screenwriter, filmmaker, producer (Les Films du Sud), and also renowned photographer, Aoulad-Syad was born in Marrakech, and his first short film, Mémoire ocre (1989), is an autobiographical account of his relationship with that city. Set in remote and forgotten places, many of Aoulad-Syad’s films explore the effects of time on his central characters. Often alienated, they are seen to wander around sparse landscapes, engaged in a quest for senses of self. Aoulad-Syad’s photographic work has greatly affected his framing of cinematic shots and his play with depth of field in nondescript environments. His Adieu forain (1998) evokes the dying world of three traditional entertainers traveling around rural Morocco with their funfair. The Wind Horse (2000), scripted by Ahmed Bouanani, narrates the story of two men trying to escape their past. Upon his release from the hospital, the younger man (Faouzi Bensaïdi) feels compelled to check whether his mother, who abandoned him as a child, is still alive, while the older man (Mohamed Majd), feeling unwelcome in his son’s home, decides to visit the grave of his beloved second wife. To make this journey, the two men