A thousand miles journey

A thousand miles journey…..




‘Some people are born great, some achieve greatness and some greatness is thrust upon them’ Shakespeare once said that. Watch closely as the story of a man behind many scenes unfolds. Carl Joshua Ncube better known as C J has used his talent for creativity in diverse projects. As an animator who wrote and directed Nyami-Nyami, the first animated film to be show cased in the history of the Zimbabwe International Film Festival and he is also behind the introduction of live graphics to ZTV and Zimbabwe in particular. ‘It is not a mistake to make a mistake but it is a mistake to repeat a mistake’ but Carl confessed that it was a mistake when he went to pick animation as a film genre. It was a mistake in two folds as he was studying to be a nurse in England and in between he worked as a party time in security companies and hotels or whatever he came across. He randomly bought a book about flash animation and he automatically became an artist so he thought the coincidence was pretty cool. When he came back to Zimbabwe someone heard that he did cartoons and they hired his services as an animator. From the onset, that was beginning into the world of animation as he started by doing a couple of animations for television, spinning logos and graphics, and then started making his own little cartoons. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step as he described the state of animation in Zimbabwe as getting ready for a bit of a boom. Interest is certainly there. The facilities are there, and the technology is working in the favor of the country. The nice thing about animation is that it’s unorthodox as he described, so people should not sit in large committee rooms for the industry to get organized. Carl believes that he is pretty excited because the numbers of home grown animations is increasing rapidly and a lot of kids in schools want to be animators. People just need to swallow their pride a little and come together and a lot of people have their own animation projects that they want to do of he had an idea that collectively they need to pick a project and work it together, hence the industry will move a step further if they come together. One must be inspired to aspire so that they won’t expire likewise Carl like demystifying stuff that people choose not to talk about. He is very keen on tokoloshies, Nyami Nyamis and all of the goblins and weird things. He is very curious to find out what secret society is lacking behind Victoria Falls; what civilization hide a treasure in the middle of the Conical Tower . . . those kinds of things interest since they make the world shine with its wonders. Of all the things he enjoys comedy and taking a satirical look at many things and desires something that identifies with who he is as a Zimbabwean. In describing why Zimbabwean, musicians and filmmakers are lacking behind in terms of stories, C J expressed that Zimbabweans are suffering from cultural extinction, which comes from the fact that the content isn’t available online. For as long as the Internet has more sites that are British or American in content, we less likely to convert our own content into that medium because we don’t see how it will work for us. Zimbabweans are failing to see that it is their responsibility to get our stories online. Crediting the 100% local content Carl vowed that people misunderstand the quality which has to come from somewhere that people should have just been allowed to produce the content, as bad as it was, and then Zimbabwe can start tweaking it and making it better. If Zimbabweans didn’t have a starting point they wouldn’t know what to do. The problem with Zimbabweans is that they don’t understand what an inventive spirit is even with the advancement in technologies; we don’t understand how to build on stuff. Culture has been described as static and does not allow free expressions and it’s always considered a taboo when you do something contrary to the norm. We’ve got so many things that people don’t want to change because they’re stuck in an old fashioned way of thinking. That’s how our culture is built. Do something different and you will get burnt; there will be a public outcry. And the media are the ones who perpetuate that even more by pushing the notion that things must remain the same. What the media don’t understand is that their role is to bring about innovation. A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless if you fail to make turn thus the journey of Carl Ncube is defined as he view criticism, tribulations and intervention of retrogressive elements who always want to see things downtrodden whenever he try to direct things into the right way as set ups for a step up.

By Latwell Nyangu

www.carljoshuancube.com