As far back as he can remember, Kuda Rwizi has been in love with animation. So much so that the love affair has seen him take up animation as part of his professional life. He credits the cartoons and anime he watched growing up, for planting the seed that would see him pursuing his career today. As he tells it, even the stories he would come up with in his head as a child were animated.
In particular, Kuda fell in love with 2D animation. From the moment he could use a pencil, he started drawing. As young as the age of 9, he was already taking it seriously. He would draw characters on bond paper, then cut them out and play with them like action figures.
Aesthetically, anime just looks more appealing to me. I love the different culture, the exaggerated style, and it being in 2D gives you a lot more control in how you can make your character move.
Kuda wanted to formally study how to create these stories he saw in his head but financially that was not to be. So the animator went about teaching himself how to bring these ideas to life. Kuda has a philosophy that says do while you learn.
It wasn’t really a matter of being good enough [to start doing animation professionally]. I don’t think I’m good enough to do a lot of things. But I still have to do it to make a living and express my creativity. I just count on my clients to like my work enough to trust me with their creative vision and then I learn as I go. Even now, I’m still learning and will likely continue learning for years to come.
Kuda was part of the 2022 cohort of Script & Bars, which saw him get assisted with skills training and grant funding to complete his first comic book and produce an animated trailer to promote it. The successful release of his webcomic and animated trailer resulted in him clinching a publishing deal with American indie publishing company Noire Cesar, to publish Mutupo in North America and Europe.
As the comic book artist and animator recalls it, he had a dream that people could turn into their totems. In his dream people were fighting each other while trying to reach a common goal, and there were metal orbs floating around filming them. He woke up and wrote it down – a few rewrites later, the comic “Mutupo” was born.
I signed with them [Noire Cesar] a while ago and they’ve been helping me get Mutupo to a higher standard before finally publishing. In that time, I’ve felt like I shouldn’t talk about it until the comic book is on the shelves. Which has required a lot of patience on my part. All in all, I’m really glad that I reached out to them and they believed in my work enough to give it a shot.
In the comic book artist’s view, there is a large market for anime locally, especially if it reflects local experiences. The quality and quantity aspect is where he feels we need to catch up, and that’s something he has taken an active hand in addressing by establishing Soqko Studios.
My mentor, Eugene Mapondera made a suggestion that made me realize we might be able to do more as a studio rather than just my sister and I against the world. So we created the studio in May of this year(2023). I admire a lot of individual animators, but the work I fall in love with every day isn’t made by one person – it’s made by many people under teams, in studios. So we wanted to do the same.
The animator regards the projects he’s working on right now as being part of the highlights of his career
Our studio only started a few months ago and we already landed a couple big projects and finally had the resources to bring other artists and animators on board to work with us. It’s been amazing setting up a vision and watching the people I work with help me bring it to life. 2 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to trust anyone else with the work I do at this level so the fact that I can now, makes me very grateful to them.
Running on 4 years working professionally in animation now, Kuda dreams of telling more African stories using anime. Although as a studio part of their tagline reads “We don’t make ‘African animation’, we just make animation, and we’re also African.”
Kuda Rwizi is part of ‘Tha Plug In’, a Creative showcase by the British Council in partnership with #enthuse Magazine.
