We're featuring one animator at a time in a series on the rise of animation in Jordan. First up is one of the newest faces on the scene; Wael Attili. Although he's been scribbling comics since he was a child, only recently did he decide to take his passion as a profession.
For someone who's decided to name his company Kharabeesh (that's "scribbles" for non-Arabic speakers), and branded it with a logo made up of a knotted mess of lines, this man gave me one of the most focused interviews ever.
He started working in the graphics field while just fresh out of high school, at BYTE M.E. (I should have asked him if the pun is intended!) magazine, as an illustrator. Then during his studies in architecture at Jordan University he was keeping a job at Arabia.com, the first Arab web portal, where he designed the media player and messenger interfaces and characters.
During his time as a Senior Designer at Syntax, he started a blog <www.sha3teely.com> where he posted much of his early cartoon work, and through which he started being approached by professionals, for collaborations based on his comical drawings.
"I thought-" he starts, but then he corrects himself by saying, "I felt that [animation] can be a business. Frankly speaking, I reached a stage where I was [saying] 'What the hell am I doing? OK, I have a job and I'm good at it, but it is not my passion.'…so I created Kharabeesh."
Story Time
As we sit in the brainstorming room (or the "brain juicing" room, as he likes to call it), Wael shares with me some of his thoughts on what he does for a living.
"Now, I'm not…claiming to be an artist. I'm not claiming to be an animator. I'm not claiming to be a cartoonist. I'm a story-teller, and Kharabeesh is a story-telling company. I love telling people stories, and I love using art to tell people a story. It's not a sprawling fantasy or fairytale. It's the short story, where in a few lines - drawn and written - you can tell a complete story."
His story-telling abilities were honed from a very young age. During the seventh grade at public school, he started a hand-drawn/written magazine and distributed it among his classmates. A year later, his Arabic teacher singled him out after reading a composition he'd written and decided to make him stay after class. "He used to make me stay at school until late, and started giving me private classes on how to write a story," remembers Wael.
"Would you like to thank him?" I interrupt.
"Definitely…Akram Al-Bashir. Defintely –definitely- one of the people who greatly influenced me. Imagine - a teacher at a government school here, saw something in a boy - me - (I don't know what he saw) and started taking from his private time to tutor him. He would let me stay late after class with him, and he'd bring me books, which I don't imagine I would have otherwise read…books by Ghassan Kanafani and Zakaria Tamer."
These are books he still keeps, and he takes one – a copy of Syrian satirist Zakaria Tamer's "The Tigers on the Tenth Day"- off the shelf to show me. It has a dedication from his teacher written on the title page. Given the state of the public education system in Jordan, it is indeed a rare occurrence for a teacher to show a special interest in, let alone encourage, a student's talent outside the set curriculum.
He mentions other influences, among them his professor at Jordan University, Dr. Yaser Saqr, who greatly impacted the way he thought about and approached anything he ever works on to this day.
Of the way of thinking that he learned from his professor, whether it is while designing a building or telling a story through animation, Wael says,"I learned that it's beyond function. It's beyond beauty. It's about the experience itself."
Play Time
It becomes apparent to me, as Wael shows me around the office, introducing me to the Kharabeesh staff, that he continues this tradition of mentoring for his own employees, by providing an environment conducive to creative thinking. He introduces them without the regular titles you would find in a corporate environment, but rather, as "artists". The walls are alive with graffiti of his own hilarious characters. I even notice that in a small corner of the main workstation there are the beginnings of a mural that looks like it's going to be the collective effort of the animators who go to work there.
Kharabeesh is probably the most prolific animation offices in Jordan (of the handful that exist here). For Normina channel's Ramadan programming, they wrote the scripts, designed the characters and completed the animation of twenty episodes of a series called "Khashom o Zagom" in thirty days. The remaining ten episodes were produced during the month of Ramadan, and there's a noticeably great development in the characters and the writing style, especially for such a limited time period.
The execution of the series is consistent with Wael's vision- to tell a story with simple yet twisted comical lines (both lines in the script and lines in the character drawing) and to reveal a useful meaning in the conclusion. It's something of a funny fable, in a way. In each episode, a word is introduced, played upon and twisted, but eventually the true meaning is revealed by the end of the episode.
He's currently working on another series of short animations that point a sharp satirical finger at societal faults and general annoyances in the everyday life of a Jordanian citizen.
Crunch Time
Of his decision to leave his job to become an entrepreneur in July 2008, he says, "I decided that it's time to take this risk. Whether I fail or succeed, I want to take this risk…and there's a huge risk involved, but the positive thing is that Amman is changing, you can see it in just the last five or six years."
He's speaking with such infectious certainty about the opportunities that are starting to ripen for young people in the creative field in Jordan. These are shaky times, economically speaking, so it'll be interesting to see what happens, to say the least.
Check back next month for the next episode, where we will profile another up-and-coming animation team.
