When The Callsheet caught up with Lesego Vorster, he was still in disbelief after receiving the award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for Character Design for Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire (Disney+) at the 3rd Annual Children’s & Family Emmy® Awards in Los Angeles.

“Winning the Emmy came as an utter and complete surprise. It’s started to sink in with all the media coverage now and getting to accept the award on stage at the ceremony in LA. But I still pull it out everyday just to check that my mind wasn’t playing a huge elaborate joke, you know, like those dreams where you learn to fly only to wake up and realise you had lost the trick of it. Humility aside, I am glad to see that my efforts to promote Authentic African Aesthetics are seen and validated on such a high level.”

Co-produced by South African animation studio Triggerfish and Peter Ramsey, co-director of the Oscar-winning film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for Disney+, Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is an animated anthology showcasing ten young creators from across Africa’s futuristic visions of the continent.

Lesego’s award-winning episode, You Give Me Heart, combines gods, social media, and a talent competition.

Lesego says: “I went into the visual development and, specifically the character design of You Give Me Heart, with a clear goal in mind. My design language is fun, inventive and grounded, but I required support from the likes of Naddya Adhiambo Oluoch-Olunya of Nalo Studios in Kenya and Caroline Vos from Triggerfish and from those two superwomen, I was pushed and challenged into thinking even more freely. Once we hit the second phase of character design moving forward, I knew we had something special. The main challenge was unifying the characters to live in a singular world believably, and I think that was achieved successfully.

“I have been in the animation space for over a decade now and my main focus was always character design before branching out more into the full production pipeline. So it is a great testament to win in that specific category at the Emmys,” he adds.

The cofounder of The Hidden Hand Studios in Joburg, Lesego studied Fine Art at Wits and has always loved animation, so he did a lot of self-training specifically in 2D animation. “During those formative years I started drawing the people around me, a daily bread exercise for character designers around the world, so my drive to push the African Aesthetic in animation was borne from that. I became intentional about how I see and portray characters and worlds and to that effect, co-founded my studio, The Hidden Hand Studios, in order to establish and push this aesthetic and narrative style even further which is still rarely seen on the global stage.”

He was also a lecturer at Wits and at The Animation School before applying and getting accepted into Gobelins lecole de l’image in Paris, where he says he learnt “an insurmountable amount about myself, my peers, the industry and my competitors”.

“It is when I was afforded the chance to not see Africa everyday that my eyes were opened further to what I had been missing, because Europe, as beautiful as it may be, is not home. So I returned with a clear goal of sharing what I had discovered on my adventures. because 2D animation is quite a taxing practice and it requires the right person to teach it and the correct candidates to be taught. 

“To this effect, I was part of the team that started up the animation internship at Tshimologong Precinct alongside my then partner in crime Isabelle Rorke with the support of IFAS, which is still running and growing from strength to strength every year. Applications are actually currently open for those youngsters that wish to better understand the animated film-making process while being challenged by a rigorous programme which promotes self-improvement.”

It was while he was at Tshimologong that Disney called him up through Triggerfish to pitch for the Kizazi Moto anthology, and the rest as they say is history.

“Since then my main focus has been on elevating my team and the work we produce over at The Hidden Hand Studios as well as pushing myself still to become a single percent better everyday. 

“The goal is to have shows, on TV, that can do for the next generations what shows like DBZ, Pokemon and Metabots did for us, but from the continent. The winds of change are picking up and we are starting to see more and more of those kinds of shows coming out.”