Uzbekistan’s animation push helps keep talented young artists – and a new generation of Karakalpaks – from losing their identity and leaving their homeland. From Eurasianet.
Tumar, a 14-year-old Karakalpak shepherd, sits on a ledge watching over her flock on a beautiful sunny day. Down in the valley below, the Amu Darya River flows calmly as Bobur, a 14-year-old Uzbek boy, tends to his family’s fields.
The pair see each other every day and have formed a friendship.
But on this day, a storm is brewing. Pelting rain and lightning start crashing down, sending Tumar’s alpha ram bolting off toward the Chilpik monument, an ancient Zoroastrian funerary structure perched high on a hill. Tumar gives chase but loses her footing on the slope.
Meanwhile, Bobur has been watching his friend while glancing nervously at the Amu Darya’s fast-rising waters, which threaten his family’s fields. He must close the irrigation gates.
“So there comes an important decision,” Anvar Fayzullayev, a 30-year-old digital artist and one of the founders of the Nukus Animation School in Uzbekistan’s autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, recounted, his voice full of suspense. “He thinks: ‘Should I save my family’s year [of] work? Or will I save Tumar?’”
This dramatic story of friendship told in the Karakalpak language is coming to life as a seven-minute animated children’s film through the work of the newly founded Nukus Animation School and its animation studio, Sawer Tales.
The school’s five founders and their 50-odd students only got started in October. But they already hope to premiere their short film, titled “Tumar,” this summer.
Preserving Culture and Language
Karakalpakstan – a territory with autonomous status, and Uzbekistan’s western-most region – is home to the Karakalpak people, a Turkic ethnic group closer culturally to Kazakhs than Uzbeks. Karakalpaks form just over a third of the region’s 2 million population and proudly guard their distinct identity. Nukus, the territory’s capital, was the scene of nationalist-inspired unrest in 2022.
Karakalpakstan is, however, principally known outside Uzbekistan as the site of the Aral Sea disaster and its toxic legacy.
The five founders of the animation school and their students are among the young people looking to write – and then animate – a new chapter for the region.
The school’s founders hope to create animated videos for children to preserve the Karakalpak language against a flood of Russian and English content on social media while also creating jobs for talented young people who otherwise might not see a future here.
“I’m working my dream job with a good salary in my hometown,” said Izzat Reimbayev, a 28-year-old animator and teacher at the school. “I’m proud that people in Karakalpakstan are doing animated films.”
The studio is part of a broader push, led by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s increasingly prominent daughter, Saida Mirziyoyeva, to promote Uzbekistan’s identity through culture and the arts. Mirziyoyeva, a 41-year-old mother of three, has given children’s content special attention.
In April last year, Mirziyoyeva called for schools and daycare centers to show a new crop of Uzbek-language animated children’s series like “Bek and Lola,” which started coming out in 2025. She and her children were in the front row of the premiere of the feature-length superhero flick “Sehrlandiya: A Heroic Mission” last December.
As a part of the push, the government is founding animation schools across the country. Nukus is the first one up and running with another in Bukhara in the works. Mirziyoyeva was insistent that the initiative begin in Karakalpakstan, said Adham Umirzakov, the school’s 34-year-old manager.
The government is paying the staff’s salaries, put them up in offices at the Nukus IT Park, and supplied high-quality equipment and software, Umirzakov said. The students’ nine-month daily animation courses are free. Mirziyoyeva visited in October last year to personally pledge her support.
“At first, we couldn’t believe that they would give us such a project with so many possibilities,” said Jambil Ungarbaev, a 30-year-old animation teacher and another of the founders.
Uzbekistan is experiencing a small animation renaissance, with Tashkent studios like Lola Animation, which created “Sehrlandiya,” and United Soft, which made “Bek and Lola,” leading the way.
New Prospects for the Future
On a weekday morning in early May, students at the Nukus Animation School were carefully manipulating animated human figures to mimic videos of real ones as part of their coursework. One bent and bowed their figure along to the latest K-Pop routine; another carefully copied the rapid leg movements of a Georgian dancer.
At the end of a long desk of computers, 21-year-old university student Madina Sharipova bent and swung her figure to match the movements of an action figure.
Sharipova, once set on becoming an English translator but now seriously considering animation, is one of approximately 50 students the school selected from some 250 applicants, many, like her, with no animation experience.
“I learned how to be consistent and how to continue my [work] and not give up,” Sharipova said, recalling the steep learning curve of the first few months.
In the next room, where the school’s artists develop characters and landscapes and translate them into digital form, Ramazan Khazanov, 22, showed off the concepts he developed for the Tumar character.
The art school student had been worried about how he would make a living after graduation, and his parents often asked what he could possibly do with his skill for drawing.
“When this opportunity came along, we proved to our parents and relatives that we can do something. That we have a future,” he said. “They started to support us more and kind of trust us more.”
Freelance animators can work remotely and make about $1,000 a month, estimated Fayzullayev, the school and studio’s public face. That is good money in Nukus.
The school is working on connecting its students to jobs. Some already do freelance work for Tashkent studios, and the school took many of its students to the animation festival in the Uzbek capital in early May to show off their portfolios, Fayzullayev said.
But the school and its studio have a broader mission as well.
There are essentially no Karakalpak children’s films or television shows available, said Ungarbaev, one of the school’s founders, who recalled watching Disney cartoons dubbed into Russian and “Tom and Jerry” as a kid.
The problem has become more serious now that children are constantly watching YouTube and TikTok, Fayzullayev chimed in. “It’s cool to use Russian. It’s cool to use English.”
The Nukus Animation School and its Sawer Tales studio are hoping to fill a void, to help preserve the use of the Karakalpak language.
The first series of videos Sawer Tales produced was of a giant traditional round bread called Zagara strolling through Nukus asking children in Karakalpak to identify animals by the sounds they make. Several of the videos quickly racked up 250,000 views on social media and turned the school’s team into local celebrities.
The characters in the short film “Tumar” will speak in Karakalpak, and it will feature a song in the language as well. They are planning Uzbek, Russian and English versions too.
“If we lose our language, we lose ourselves,” said Biybinaz Uzaqbaeva, a 21-year-old student at the school whose first language is Karakalpak. “We grew up here and have spoken this language since childhood. Our first word was in Karakalpak.”
For now, the studio is concentrating on graduating its first class of animators and digital artists in June and releasing “Tumar” later this summer, but their dream is to one day grow the school into an animation powerhouse and Sawer Tales into a big studio.
“We want to show Karakalpak traditions to the world,” Fayzullayev said.
As to Tumar’s fate and Bobur’s decision, audiences will have to wait for the film to come out this summer to find out what happens, but Fayzullayev assures, “Bobur does the right thing.”
Alexander Thompson is a journalist based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, reporting on current events across Central Asia. He previously worked for U.S. newspapers, including The Post and Courier and The Boston Globe. This article is republished with permission from Eurasianet.
