In my review of the latest volume of Star Wars: Visions, I spoke of the upsides of streaming (which is beginning to lose people, especially as movie theaters are coming back with a vengeance, with their Barbenheimers and Tom Cruise extravaganzas and what-have-you), arguing that streaming is best "when it gives an outlet to smaller creatives who may have gone unnoticed in the past"; something that also helps the output quotas of the platform in question and theoretically keeps people watching. Something else I mentioned was a studio called Triggerfish, a South African animation firm that created the final short film of that volume.
As chance would have it, they now get to bring their own animation anthology to the Disney+ screen and the millions of eyes that look there.
Of course, the operative word is "new", and although more and more people are getting tired of remakes, superhero titles, et al., I don't think the word "new" is as exciting to people as it might've once been. I first heard about the show in a discussion on Twitter, regarding representation in media and how tired people are of "race-bent characters" in the place of NEW and ORIGINAL characters to represent people of color. Sooner or later came this response, roughly paraphrased: "If you mean it, why aren't you talking about Kizazi Moto?"
Why indeed. This is, as dramatic as I may sound, a show that truly NEEDS to be a success. It's not just because it's "new" representation (unique voices being amplified, hailing from an area whose art so often gets pushed aside by mainstream slop) or "new", period -- as in, not based on an IP.
It's also because it's a really good show where each episode/short film is expressive, genuine, and imaginative in its own right -- even if some concepts feel a bit half-baked. The world-building and style of almost every episode suggest a pretty good would-be TV series, but we'll see if any of these concepts ever spin off into anything in particular.
It is an unfortunate fact of shows like this that they're sort of a modern-day What A Cartoon! Show, except none of the pilots get picked up.
