SA animator Lesego Vorster wins Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement

South African animator Lesego Vorster won a Children’s & Family Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for his character design work on Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire.

Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is a 10-part collection of original animated short films by Disney+.

Vorster directed the ninth episode of the 10-part series; his film is titled You Give Me Heart.

The film is centred on social media and influencer culture. In the short animation, the person with the most followers becomes a god.

“I was playing with the notions of self-validation. There’s a lot of entitlement that we have now; there’s a lot of instant gratification, as opposed to delayed gratification,” said Vorster on a podcast in 2023.

Vorster has more than a decade of experience as an Art Director, Visual Development artist, Animator and teacher.

He co-founded The Hidden Hand Studios, a mainly 2D animation studio that elevates Authentic African Aesthetics and Narratives.

The awards were held at Television City in Los Angeles on Saturday night. The award ceremony was hosted by Looney Tune’s voice actor Eric Bauza.

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) organised the third annual Children’s and Family Emmy Awards.

The awards honoured the “pinnacle of creativity and innovation in children’s entertainment,” NATAS said.

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Pearl Thusi made for the role

The 2D animator said the idea for the film stemmed from his apprehension about social media.

“That’s where the idea for You Give Me Heart came from. I’ve had my own struggles with social media where I started creating art just to post. The Lesego inside was like, ‘What are you doing? This is not who you are’.”

Vorster said he wrote a ‘little’ story following his struggle with social media and just put it away.

“So when I was invited to pitch, I pulled it out and [I was like] ‘what about this’, and they fell in love with it. Working on the story was another monster by itself because it was unrefined,” he said.

The short film stars media personality Pearl Thusi, who voices one of the leading characters, Maadi.

Vorster said having on the cast Thusi gave the story a sense of authenticity because Thusi is an influencer in her own right.

“It landed some authenticity to this because I designed the character with her in mind. So when we got her, [I told her] ‘just be yourself…you are a lot, just be a lot’, and the part was really tailored for her,” shared Vorster.

Kizazi Moto draws on the continent’s rich and diverse histories and cultures to present 10 sci-fi and fantasy stories featuring bold and brave new worlds of advanced technology, aliens, spirits, and monsters.

The animated anthology was executive produced by Peter Ramsey, co-director of the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, alongside Tendayi Nyeke and Anthony Silverston from Triggerfish, the lead studio on this anthology.

Kizazi Moto made its debut globally in July 2023, exclusively on Disney+.

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Animation in SA

In the same podcast that Vorster was on, which included some of the contributors on Kizazi Moto, the directors spoke about the animation’s place in South African film and storytelling.

The director of Hatima, which is part of Kazizi Moto, Isaac Mogajane, who has a background in live-action films, said live-action doesn’t give filmmakers creative room when they have to create certain universes.

“As expensive as animation is, once you get to that genre of things, it’s really difficult to be as creatively free as you are in animation,” said Magojane.

“As you’ll see in Kazizi Moto there’s a lot of spirituality, a lot of folklore, a lot of mythology a lot of magical realism we love to explore as Africans. Animation, I think, is the best medium to really do it justice.”

“The scope of kind of stories you can tell are limitless as opposed to live-action where you have to be quite practical in terms of what you put on the screen.”

Director of Surf Sangoma Catherin Green said the beauty of animation is in its accessibility.

“It’s a more embracing genre or medium that can really connect with people from a very young age and a very old age,” Green shared.

Surf Sangoma is one of the five films that are part of Kazizi Moto, and 702 broadcaster Relebogile Mabotja worked on it as a voice director.

“In South Africa, we don’t have many voice directors that do animation because the space is not big yet,” Mabotja told The Citizen in 2023.

“So if I were to ask you to name me three South African animations, you’d probably struggle to name me one. Yes, it’s [animation] used in digital content, in commercials, but for this type of specific animation, there isn’t much of that around.”

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