Season Review: Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire Season One

Overview:

A unique anthology series showing futuristic ideas from African perspectives.

Our Take:

Anthology series are always interesting because they usually contain different stories, different characters, and different styles. Kizazi Moto is no different in that regard, but it’s the first one to take a futuristic approach while doing so from African perspectives.

Creators from different African countries, such as Uganda, Zimbabwe, Egypt, and others worked on these shorts. Each short revolves around different futuristic ideas including time travel and alternate universes. They all have African settings and they incorporate references to different African cultures as well. There’s at least one character in each short who says something in Swahili, Zulu, or a number of different languages.

This series tackles topics like social media, self-reflection, and other serious subjects. They’re all handled pretty well and presented in an interesting manner. One episode features a boy competing against an alien in a high-speed race and another one. Another one shows the main character surfing to save their friend from corrupted squids. A lot of these concepts seem outlandish given the futuristic approach this series takes, but most of them are pretty interesting.

My personal favorite is “You Give Heart My Heart.” This episode revolves around someone who’s not popular on social media and he just wants people to notice him. He ends up winning a talent contest to become the God of Creativity. This gets him more attention and he also gets close to someone. Unfortunately, he soon learns about the negativity that social media attention can bring. I enjoy the commentary this short provides on this topic. Social media is such a large part of peoples’ daily lives that I think some people don’t realize what negative effects it could have. If you only watch one of these shorts, I think this would be the one the check out.

There are a couple of shorts that don’t keep my engagement as much as others, but none of them are bad. They each have something to offer, whether it be likable characters, interesting plots, or stunning visuals. The animation and music is great all around in this series. Each short looks distinct with its own style and there’s a lot of variety between them. There’s variety in the music as well, which adds a new dynamic to each short.

Overall, Kizazi Moto is a very unique viewing experience. I think it’s definitely worth a watch. There are only ten episodes and they’re each about 15 minutes long, so it’s not a huge time commitment. It’s also okay if you’re not that familiar with African cultures. I feel that most of the shorts do a good job at explaining everything you need to know for context. I enjoyed watching this anthology series and I would like to see more like this. Whether we get more episodes of Kizazi Moto or more anthology series that revolve around other different cultures, this is an idea that could definitely be expanded upon.