West African Culture through animated film: The Example of Kirikou's
- Citation:
- HAK, M. G. A. D. E. K., "West African Culture through animated film: The Example of Kirikou's", Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, Maryland, USA, Lexington Books, 2015.
Abstract:
Kirikou and the Sorceress ( Kirikou et la sorcière) is an animation film written and directed by Michel Ocelot, that was released in 1998. The story is based on Contes de la brousse et de la foret( Tales of the Bush ), written more than half a century before by André Davesne et Joseph Gouin (1921). The film was so successful that Ocelot followed it with two sequels, Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (Kirikou et les betes sauvages) in 2005 and Kirikou and the Men and the Women (Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes) in 2012. The first film is a feature film while the two others are composed of a series of short films (four in the second and five in the third). In these short films, it is Kirikou's grandfather who narrates the hero's adventures with the sorceress.
The present study aims to point out and analyze the relationship between the cultural and the visual aspects through Michel Ocelot's "trilogy", by exploring animation film in its connection to West African francophone culture, through a semiotic approach.