When Cyprian Ekwensi wrote The Passport of Mallam Ilia in 1960, he probably didn’t imagine that, decades later, it would inspire Nigeria’s biggest animated feature. But for Ferdinand “Ferdy” Adimefe, co-founder of Magic Carpet Studios, the story had been living rent-free in his head for years.

Fast-forward to today, and that childhood dream has evolved into a seven-year journey of building an animation team from scratch, navigating fundraising heartbreaks, and propelling Nigerian storytelling onto the global stage.

Why this story?

Mallam Ilia stood out in a library of African literature dominated by heavy political and postcolonial themes. It’s an adventure filled with action, love, betrayal, and culture, the kind of narrative that naturally lends itself to the screen.

Magic Carpet tested the waters with a poll in 2018. Nigerians were keen. Then Netflix repeated the exercise in 2024, and 95% of respondents voted for Mallam Ilia as the Nigerian book they most wanted adapted. That was the green light.

The formation of this team began with the kick-off of the project in 2018 with a small group of ambitious creators, animators, illustrators, and writers who mostly learned on the job.

Over the years, the team grew bigger, stronger, and more skilled, pulling in collaborators from South Africa, India, the UK, and the US. Still, 90% of the work remained proudly Nigerian.

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The process: from script to 173,000 drawings

Adimefe insists animation starts with the script. “There’s an economy of words. You leave room for the picture and sound to tell the story.”

The studio spent eight months perfecting the script with writer M.I. Thomas, even travelling to Kano for cultural accuracy. Then came animatics, rough moving storyboards, before the real grind began animating.

A two-hour 2D animation at 24 frames per second meant nearly 173,000 hand-drawn frames. Every brush stroke, every scene, is a labour of love.

The team experimented with dummy voicing, delegated simpler scenes to rookies, reserved the tough ones for veterans, and leaned on foreign specialists for special effects. 

A $2 million dream, and the money struggles

At first, the budget was pegged at $1 million. Then South African collaborators raised the bar, pushing it to $8 million. Eventually, both sides agreed on $2 million.

Raising that money, though, was a saga in itself. Some investors backed out. Distribution deals fell through. Then COVID-19 hit.

 Adimefe admits to having packed his bag and quit when COVID-19 hit, but they refused to give up. Between commercial jobs, crowdfunding, and new investors, Magic Carpet pulled together about $1.4 million. Enough to keep the project alive.

What’s next?

Today, the film is in its cleanup stage, with 70% of production wrapped. The target release: April 2026.

The team is also dreaming big about the soundtrack, a $100,000 budget, with hopes of bringing in stars like Tems, Tiwa Savage, and Cobhams. And the world seems ready. Netflix has shown interest, global distributors are circling, and African animation is finally being seen as more than “cartoons for kids”.

Behind the glowing headlines are seven years of sacrifice, nights in a studio-turned-hostel, unpaid training, countless rejections, and tens of thousands of painstaking drawings.

But through it all, the dream never dimmed: to put African stories, drawn by African hands, on the global animation map.

As Adimefe puts it: “Netflix has very little animation from Africa, and with this project, it is on course to change the narrative.”

Anita Chinedu