Animating children’s stories may highly appeal to their senses but the business of animation is no child’s play. Add culture, history and our ecology to the narrative and it enriches the production in immense ways.
Chief Nyamweya strongly believes that his work as an animator at Pungulu Pa Productions should be identified as a cultural carrier in the same way curators at the museum do with fossils.
“We are practitioners bringing culture into a medium that our children can identify with, which is technology,” says Chief.
Pungulu Pa is the animation studio behind the show Ulli and Tata’s African Nursery Rhymes.
The 2D animation series, currently found on YouTube chronicles a brother and sister - Uli and Tata as they follow their friend, the bird, Tuki’s help and travel around Kenya in search of nursery rhymes. Ultimately, Uli and Tata is much more than nursery rhymes, it is history, culture, research and an archive for African children all in one.
The genesis
Pungulu Pa’s founders - Nyamweya, his wife Sarah Mallia and their partner Manu Akatsa created this series out of a need. Having successfully run their studio Freehand Movement, which creates socially impactful content and experiences, Chief and Sarah over time graduated socially to parenthood.
Sarah began looking online for local nursery rhymes to teach their children. Her undergraduate dissertation as a psychologist had taught her that people (children) who are rooted or have a sense of identity have better well-being in future. They wanted to pass on their Kenyan and Malta roots to their children.
Her efforts did not yield much in terms of finding nursery rhymes from East and Central Africa save for the collection of African lullabies by Comptine d’Afrique online.
These songs compiled by Amadou Sanfo accompanied by Malian and Burkinabe musicians are a wonderful repertoire of children’s lullabies and play songs accompanied by string instruments. Different versions of the songs are also attributed to compilations of Senegalese musician and storyteller Souleyman Mbodj.
Chief was challenged the lack of songs archived from this part of Africa. “West Africa have a rich repository of their music and it has fantastic rhythm because they tend to celebrate culture more. In terms of telling the story, Kenya is supposed to be the Silicon Savannah so how come we are not using this creativity to animate content for children?”
Funding
The trio got thinking and Sarah says they made a pact - they would create something similar to what they had seen with Comptine d’Afrique and ensure it would be accessible to children across Africa. They made a pilot pitch in 2020 and began sourcing funds. The Kenya Film Commission (KFC) through an empowerment grant gave them Sh1.4 million for a pilot show.
Chief credits the commission saying Uli and Tata would not exist if it was not for that grant. He is a strong advocate for KFC which he knows is currently underfunded but a strong vehicle for many artistes who need a push to get their creativity in the right direction.
Research
The strength of Uli and Tata’s songs comes from its research. Abdi Rashid Jibril is their field producer and the heart behind the preparation for the production team to go on the ground. He scouts the venues they will be at, locates the musicians and whatever else is required to get a feel for that community.
On receipt of the funding, the team went to Kakamega Forest where Manu hails from. Initial research has shown that the Luhya community in Kenya has more catchy music. For their pilot pitch, they googled Kakamega Forest and tried to visualise it on paper but what they found blew them away.
“There were trees more than 900 years old in the forest whose roots were higher than houses. The ecology within the forest is rich and widely celebrated by the people,” Chief says.
“Anyone can sow seeds but nurturing what already exists is where the work is. If we really are sincere about the ecology why are we not nurturing what is already there?” He quips.
The storyline in Uli and Tata is really the intersection of culture and nature infused with music. Both Chief and Sarah come from backgrounds that celebrate ecology - Chief’s late father was obsessed with trees and nature while Sarah’s grandfather, who served in Malta’s first Cabinet was an environmentalist who won several awards.
Manu, an environment photographer was the right person to get them the aerial footage wherever they went and even their office on Dagoretti Road, Nairobi is surrounded by trees.
In Kakamega, they met with students in schools and traditional musicians to identify key children’s songs from the community. Each time they spoke to the village folk, including Manu’s grandmother’s friends, the song Tsimbidi came up and it was chosen to represent their first pilot. The song is about planting seeds. Chief turned the storyline to two children who plant seeds and eventually grow a forest.
The forest also gave them Tuki, a Great Blue Turaco, which is an indigenous bird found in Kakamega Forest and all forests in Uganda. For the Ogiek from the Mau forest, everything in their life relates to this intersection of nature and culture. The song the picked - Silibwenyon -honours the Dombeya torrida tree which is the home of the bees that produce honey.
“If you take an Ogiek person out of their context where they practice their culture - the language will limp on but will be divorced from the ecology,” says Chief.
Sarah says that the brief to the team is to find the things that distinguish that area and share it. For the episode from Kakamega, they showcase the town and the sugarcane, from Kisumu it is the fish market, the Chalbi desert is the sand dunes, Lamu the dhows and in Kilifi it is the mangrove.
Funding Uli and Tata
With their pilot ready, Pungulu Pa realized they would need funding to get the rest of the episodes ready. A friend advised Sarah to get out of Kenya and go to the content markets where the buyers, funders and producers go. Their first stop was DISCOP market, which is a sales focused event facilitating the marketing and distribution of ‘Made in Africa’ content.
The event was cancelled - but they were already at the airport boarding for Kigali. While there, they met Serge Nokue, pitched Uli and Tata and returned home. They also had a screening of the pilot show in Nairobi where they invested in hiring a theatre and entertainment but heard nothing. 4 months later, Sarah received a phone call from the French Embassy in Kenya with a grant to support 7 episodes. The grant was conditional, they had to build a proper studio and train upcoming animators.
Sarah, who is the creative producer states that the business of animation is expensive, particularly at the onsent. Pungulu Pa have just released all 9 episodes in their first series on YouTube. “We completely underbudgeted for these episodes but are happy with where we are,” she notes. Overall, they have spent about $300,000 for this season alone.
"Rates per minute of animation in the global south can cost anywhere between 4-8000 dollars per minute but we produce ours at 6,000 dollars per minute,” says Sarah.
For a 6 minute episode, that translates to about 36,000 dollars for a single show. The funding came from KFC for seed development, French Embassy to produce 6.5 episodes and National Geographic who supported the set up of their studio and one episode in Tanzania. Africa no Filter is also supporting their post production while the French Agency for Development is supporting their marketing and distribution.
Chief says the episodes will pay off at the end, but it takes a whole lot of investment to start off in the beginning. Their greatest costs is in people and talent because it takes an entire team to put together a single episode. They also leave something in the communities they work with - the traditional musicians, the children who sing the music they record and are careful that this is all seen as their community engagement.
Talent
When starting off Uli and Tata, Chief recalls being warned that they would not find local talent to create the kind of shows they were looking to do.
“At the beginning, the critics were right because it was too expensive to make animation in Kenya and it was much cheaper to outsource to India which has mastered how to do cost control. India can charge about $3,000 for a minute of animation and they are very quick. But, we have proved them wrong in the end.”
Chief says Uli and Tata is one of the very few shows in the continent being produced entirely by an African team, and the very first Kenyan one.
“All our work is done locally at Pungulu Pa with one or two functions outsourced, like the rigging (of the movements). We have however trained one of our colleagues in rigging and very soon we will be able to do this fully from here,” he notes.
Chief says once an ecosystem is created for any work environment, it becomes easy for people to function. “We’ve created ecosystems for traditional practices like medicine, surgery, even engineering. Why would we not put the same in animation to allow the practitioners flourish?”
When production is in session, Pungulu Pa has a team of about 35 people working in research, scriptwriting, music, editing and post-production. In 2024, the studio hired 15 interns and has retained 8 of them on staff, many of these fresh out of college. Sarah who manages the business says their commitment is to have 25 interns in 2025 and keep on building talent.
The work Pungulu Pa and Freehand Studios is working on is also showing. In 2024, Chief and Sarah were chosen as part of the 2024 Jurors for the International Emmy Awards Competition. Joining a host of producers, media executives and CEOs of well-established content companies, it put them on a global map. Chief is the current Chairman of the Animation Association of Kenya.
Uli and Tata is about reclaiming our stories, our history(ies) and creativity amongst children. I ask Sarah why the songs they have re-made are not subtitled in English. “Children don’t read, they sing’” she says, and this is why orature is important for their company as it is passing on something that already exists, and what they want their children to remember.
