The Politically Trenchant Fables of Animation Pioneer Moustapha Alassane

At the film’s narrative turning point, the chief runs away from the monster and turns into a tiny speck zipping across the landscape. Moustapha’s next short, Bon voyage, Sim (1966), was made a year later and illustrates the evolution of this technical shorthand, as the protagonist—Mr. Sim, the president of an unnamed African nation—is twice shown turning into a small, fast-moving sphere. A cunning and timeless political critique, the film sketches the archetype of leaders more likely to inspire mockery than respect. Mr. Sim’s trip abroad, made upon the request of a neighboring country, unfolds as a caricature of governance and diplomacy utterly disconnected from the citizenry but dedicated to empty ceremonies (a form of stately pomp that bears a European mark). His jaunt is taken up with spectacles of transport, soldiers presenting arms, musicians playing military anthems, and a meeting that consists entirely of pleasantries and vague platitudes. One of the public displays features a row of frogs trotting on a rotating cylinder, moving but going nowhere—perhaps a metaphor for the tragedy of postcolonial states recycling the power infrastructures imposed by colonization rather than breaking free from them.

Within the framework of Moustapha’s own evolving, multiform art practice, Bon voyage, Sim reads as a commentary on the expanding ubiquity and evolving plurality of cinematic technologies as well as global networks of communication. The abundance of cameras, microphones, radios, and headphones in the film reflects what was then an already increasingly mediatized experience of political power and social organization, mapped onto a rift between popular demands and governing authorities.

Remarkably relevant over a half century after it was made, Bon voyage, Sim encapsulates Moustapha’s explorations of movement as the language of animation, carried through the film’s many roads, cars, bridge, and planes. “Air Afrique” merits mention here. The airline, which existed from 1961 to 2002, was a beacon of Pan-African mobility and the promise of economic integration. But its demise held a grim symbolic charge, mirroring the ballooning and then deflation of postindependence aspirations for self-determination on the African continent. Bearing the logo now nostalgic to many of us, the animated airplane in Bon voyage, Sim parallels the real thing in Return of an Adventurer (1966), Moustapha’s satirical reworking of the quintessential American genre: the western. Through the story of a traveler who returns to his home village with a trunkful of cowboy garb to share with his friends, the filmmaker stages a porous confrontation between modernity and tradition, mingling colonial imports and local mores. The transposition of Hollywood tropes—cowboy hats, belts, and boots; outlaw behavior and brigand antics; horse rides across open landscapes; fistfights and gunfights in public spaces—into Moustapha’s contemporary Niger creates a hybrid genre, a Sahelian western that meditates on cultural imperialism and cinematic hegemonies with the critical distance of parody. Reminiscent of his animations, the fight sequences are a choreography of highly stylized theatrics, full of stiff and exaggerated movements, paired with the comical use of hyperbolic sound effects. Just as the Malian portraitist Seydou Keïta had done with photography in the 1950s, Moustapha’s filmic study of play-acting and masquerade functioned as an examination of social performance and the inventive ways African youths refashioned themselves.

Return of an Adventurer is indicative of the reigning power of American distribution, which was damaging to the development of indigenous film production, even as U.S. fare succeeded in cultivating receptive audiences in African cities. The characters come across as true fans of the western genre, while the parodic tone expresses the ambivalent dynamics of negotiated imposition and willful appropriation. The film is also notable as the debut of actor Zalika Souley, who plays the sole woman in the band of Nigerien cowboys. Her almost undifferentiated participation in horse-riding, pistol-drawing, and all but the most combative stunts is a statement on women’s fluid, evolving social roles. The initially ludic tone of Return of an Adventurer sharpens into a cautionary end. While the violence throughout is largely driven by a single character whose criminal behavior precedes the cowboy dress-up, the introduction of American influences is responsible for a temporary disintegration of social norms that accelerates youthful revolt, insolence toward elders, and disregard for customs before tipping into a senseless loss of life.

A tragic death also occurs in Samba the Great (1977), a film adapted from a fable about the princess Analiatou Bari, whose requests of her suitor, the valiant Samba Gana, begin as reasonable tests of valor, before giving way to insulting levels of doubt. Recalling The Death of Gandji, the film demonstrates Moustapha’s approach to cinema as a preservation of oral storytelling, a task of safeguarding an imperiled cornerstone of cultural identity that he shared with other filmmakers such as the Senegalese Safi Faye and the Malian Souleymane Cissé. In contrast to Mr. Sim, Samba is the model of African leadership prior to or outside of the changes brought by colonization, idealized as a paragon of bravery and fairness. Samba the Great features Moustapha’s deft combination of drawings and puppets; the backdrops are watercolor tableaux, while the characters are meticulously constructed three-dimensional figurines. His skill shines in the details of Analiatou Bari’s intricate jewelry and embroidered headscarf; the wide variety of costumes; the elaborate choreography of the fight sequences; the subtle movements of the puppets, who play clearly identifiable instruments like the kora while nodding their heads or holding their hands in prayer; and the impressive integration of cinematic techniques, such as close-ups, to accent the narrative. Samba the Great’s distinctly fabular ending couches its transmission of the traditional function of stories as civic instruction, a central quality in Moustapha’s oeuvre that was identified early on by his contemporary Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the Beninese-Senegalese filmmaker, historian, and theorist.

Much lighter fare, Kokoa (2001) features a wealth of anthropomorphic animals—a chameleon, a crab, a turtle, and, of course, numerous frogs—who seem to have been charmingly inflated to assume a materiality and fresh color, in contrast to their earlier incarnations in Bon voyage, Sim and The Death of Gandji as black-and-white sketches. Kokoa, which means fight in Hausa, is structured as a series of wrestling matches, accompanied by the commentary of a frog sitting at a desk wearing headphones. In Niger, as in Senegal, wrestling has bridged the rupture of colonization and the separation of rural and urban areas, enduring as a form of cultural continuity. Language has also been crucial to maintaining precolonial knowledge and lifeways, and here the French translation runs parallel to the Hausa version, reflecting the linguistic intermixing that has continued into the present (as of this year, Hausa has replaced colonial French as Niger’s official language). The sonic design combines the traditional practice of live drumming to accompany the fights with the technological intervention of the mediatized remarks. 

Moustapha’s life and art are chronicled in the documentary Moustapha Alassane, Cineaste of the Possible (2008), in which we see the man—who in his youth conjured worlds with pen, cut-out paper, and candlelight—as an elder, his face illuminated by the bluish glow of a desktop computer. Tirelessly committed to the pliability of his craft, Moustapha kept to his wayward path, even as he transitioned into the digital age. Later in his career, he adapted a model of mobile cinema that had existed throughout the liberatory Third World cinema cultures of the 1960s and ’70s, seeking to ensure that communities outside of city centers would have access. In the documentary, Mariama Hima—a Nigérienne filmmaker and political figure—calls him an all-too-modest “patrimoine ambulant,” or “walking heritage.” Retiring to Tahoua, where he added a studio to his home complex, Moustapha yoked his fierce autonomy to an equally steadfast desire to pass on what he had learned by tinkering away in what he calls “his dusty little corner.” He was a teacher whose dream was to create a software that children everywhere could use to make their own animations.

The improvisatory and imaginative dynamism of creating movement, characters, and stories from rudimentary materials is a metaphor for the restless and mercurial quality of his artistic practice. Moustapha fused ingenious technical skill and handmade bric-a-brac to express the true nature of invention—the creation of art not from nothing but from what was already there.