Comfort Arthur’s ‘The Underestimated Villain’ nominated for Annecy competition

This summer will see the return of the ‘Cannes of Animation’, The Annecy International Animation Festival. After two virtual editions, this year- all being well- will return to the full-blown in-person experience.  This week the selection for the Graduation Short Films, TV Films and Commissioned categories were announced.

It included Comfort Arthur’s ‘The Underestimated Villain’ in the Commissioned Films category. Full announcement can be seen here.“The Underestimated Villain” an animated film seeking to provide information on Malaria.

In an interview with Ameyaw Debrah, Comfort revealed that when she was contacted by Comic Relief to work on a short-film about Malaria, her goal was to do something different from all the other malaria projects we have seen.

“I’m sure you’ve seen all of these educational films about malaria. They’re very educational but they’re not very entertaining and impactful. As I’ve done with Black Barbie with poetry, I worked with Poetra Asantewaa who came up with a poem. We decided that there’s no point of us saying the educational stuff, so why don’t we use reverse psychology to get people to think. So we created the villain, the anopheles mosquito and made her a diva, to be celebrated, but she’s actually mocking the audience,” she told Ameyaw Debrah.

Speaking about some of the challenges she encountered while working on the short-film, Comfort stated;

“When it comes to these sensitive topics, you want it to be entertaining. We also didn’t want it to be over entertaining and miss the point. We also wanted it to be a specific time so people don’t get bored and lose concentration.

“The Underestimated Villain,” which has now been put in five different Ghanaian dialects, according to Comfort, has become very accessible to a lot of Ghanaians who hitherto, would not have gotten the message had it been in only English.

Comfort Arthur was born in the UK but my parents are Ghanaian. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design and a Masters in Animation. She is best known for the animation works such as Black Barbie, The Cursed Ones and Children of the Mountain. She is the founder of “The Comfy Studio” which is a multimedia studio based in Ghana.

Black Barbie was nominated in 2017 in the Perspective competition category of the Annecy International Animation Festival. The festival organisers received over 1,530 films in these categories, representing a total of 64 countries. From this, they selected 28 Graduation films, 24 TV films and 37 commissioned films, which will compete for several awards.

The next wave will come in the form of VR Works, set to be announced towards the end of April. Finally, the feature films election will be announced in early May. The 2022 edition of the festival is set to run from June 13 to June 18, with the Annecy International Animation Film Market (MIFA) taking place June 14-17.