(Dis)placing the Year of the Elephant: Saudi Arabia’s Animated Journey to National Opening

Saudi Arabia is promoting the locality and authenticity of its culture, even while globalizing it, through a peculiar medium: its nascent manga industry.

Less than a third of the way into the animated film al-Rihla (The Journey), our protagonist Aws confronts a ghost from his criminal past: Zurara. They had once been friends, of a sort, if such a thing could be said of two children who had met as orphans and were conscripted by bandits; when they finally hatched an escape plan, only Aws got away. He eventually found refuge with an adoptive family in Mecca. Now, on the eve of an imminent invasion of the city, Aws discovers Zurara is one among many gathered to defend it—not out of love for family, but need for money. “No need to apologize,” Zurara informs a guilt-ridden Aws. “I depend on no one, I trust no one, and unlike you lot, I don’t need any kind of faith.” Aws is unmoved: “I used to think like you before I came to Mecca. But I was saved by a story of faith that my adoptive father told me.” Aws proceeds to narrate the story of Naram, a shepherd who helped build Noah’s Ark and was saved from the subsequent Flood.

It is an odd scene in an odd film. The text is telling us a straightforward parable about the power of faith, but little else is intuitive. What are we to make of the choice to center this narrative about Mecca on two non-Meccans, one visually coded as Arab, the other as an ethnically ambiguous (and frankly anachronistic) foreigner? Why, in the span of this single scene, does the meaning of “faith” slip from a secular ideal of tribal devotion (“naive crap about protecting and fighting for people,” in Zurara’s words) to a more overtly religious trust in Divine salvation (represented by Aws)? Why, of all stories, does Aws relate that of Noah’s Ark? In fact, why, in the first place, did Manga Productions, the studio behind the film, choose the Qur’anic Chapter of the Elephant—about God’s destruction of the Abyssinian warlord Abraha’s attempted invasion of Mecca in 580 AD—as the subject matter of its opening filmic project, the first Saudi Arabian-Japanese animated film ever?

Importing Insularity

Manga Productions, a subsidiary company of the Mohammed bin Salman “MiSK” Foundation, was established in 2017—the same year that Muhammad bin Salman was appointed crown prince. It represents but one front in the sustained social, cultural, and economic diversification of the Kingdom enacted by bin Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030 program. Bin Salman’s government has invested billions of dollars in the entertainment sector—multi-year Netflix partnerships, massive gaming acquisitions, media licensing, and beyond.¹

Many have interpreted Vision 2030, especially in its emphasis on entertainment, as a project of secularization. Bin Salman himself has framed his reforms as a return to “a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions.” What that has meant, in practice, is a systematic de-empowerment of the Wahhabi religious establishment central to the Saudi state’s political legitimation under bin Salman’s predecessors. Some of the more (in)famous reforms include permitting women to drive, opening coeducational classrooms, cutting funding to overseas Wahhabi religious institutions, curtailing the power of the religious police, and even reducing the volume levels of mosque loudspeakers. The turn away from Wahhabism has been widely understood as an attempt to reorient Saudi identity around nation rather than religion—a “Saudi First” nationalism marked by such developments as the 2019 establishment of “Foundation Day” and the expunging of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab from national textbooks and from the state’s founding political myth more broadly.

Against the “religious nationalism” cultivated by the current Saudi state following its founding in 1932, and the Cold War-era “pan-Islamic transnational identity” promoted by King Faisal and his successors since the 1960s, anthropology professor Madawi al-Rasheed identifies the present moment as a “retreat to a narrow Saudi nationalism” distinguished by an emphasis on “strong local national identity.” This domestic focus seemingly exists in tension with bin Salman’s “urgent and incessant quest to draw both international capital and high-profile investors to make Saudi Arabia their home.” In practice, “Saudi Arabia for Saudis,” as one popular social media campaign goes, also means Saudi Arabia for everybody.

Manga Productions, at first glance, seems to promote this new nationalism in all of its dissonant neoliberal localism. For starters, the company’s main product is anime and manga—both foreign artforms. Yet Japanese animation has enjoyed a long-standing popularity in the Arab world, even before the global mainstreaming of anime in the past decade. Going all in on animanga is thus a strategic choice, insofar as it allows the Saudi state to simultaneously appeal to local tastes and capitalize on the global market for Japanese popular culture.² Unsurprisingly, Manga Productions hired Rasha Rizk, the Syrian songwriter beloved for her Arabic theme songs of dubbed anime classics, to sing the opening and ending theme songs of its first television series, Future’s Folktales.

“Our goal at Manga Productions,” CEO Essam al-Bukhari tells us, “is to export our enriched Arabian culture to the world and to showcase our talented Saudi youth who can compete and prove their skills in developing quality animation and further build the creative content industry in the region.” Again and again in his interviews, Bukhari demonstrates a command of the corporate vernacular required for admission into global networks of capital, ritualistically reciting strings of sanctioned keywords: “The project’s original, high-quality, and authentic content is truly reflective of our cultural and societal values; one that champions local creatives while spotlighting our international partners.”

Preserving the “authenticity” of Saudi culture even while globalizing it is a recurring theme in Bukhari’s rhetoric. The nascent Saudi Arabian manga industry, he says, will pioneer “localized storytelling that encapsulates the customs and traditions of Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.” What is meant by Saudi “authenticity,” or “customs and traditions,” is never explained, even though these terms discursively replace “religion” as the foundation of Saudi identity.

Throughout the extensive press tour leading up to the 2021 release of The Journey, Bukhari seemingly made a concerted effort to eschew any mention of Islam whatsoever. His Japanese collaborators followed suit. Director Shinji Shimizu, for instance, emphasized how great an honor it was to make “Saudi Arabia’s very first animation film based on the history and culture of ancient Arabia.” Press releases delicately toed the same line: “Inspired by Arabian folklore, the movie tells the story of Aws, a potter with a secret past who is caught up in a battle while trying to defend his city.” This secular(izing) marketing campaign appears to have worked; one Western reviewer expressed appreciation for the film’s rendition of “the traditional Saudi story of the Elephant Army.”

An outsider could be forgiven for thinking al-Rihla had nothing to do with the Qur’an. Yet as the aforementioned scene between Aws and Zurara indicates, the actual film is in fact saturated with Islamic themes. Al-Rihla thus suggests that the place of Islam in Saudi Arabia’s new national project is more complex than a simple narrative of “secularization” or even “moderation” would indicate. Indeed, the film provides something of a map key for the set of ideological antinomies by which the new Saudi nationalism is constituted. In many ways al-Rihla dramatizes the current Saudi national project by narratively, aesthetically, and formally reproducing and reconciling said antinomies. The film thus allegorizes its own production process, and through that the production process of the new Saudi national imaginary.

Here is what I propose is revealed by a close reading of al-Rihla: the “tension” between an Islamic and “secular” identity, and between localism and globalist capitalism, is in fact the mechanism by which the Saudi national project constitutes itself. It is not just that bin Salman’s nationalist project marries increasing insularity to unprecedented “openness”—it is that it achieves its insularity through its openness. Put differently, the new Saudi national narrative unfolds through a master dialectic of insularity/openness—or, perhaps, of insular openness. This dialectic finds its corollary in the realm of “religion”: secularity is not asserted against Islam, but rather articulated through an Islamic idiom. In other words, the master dialectic of insularity/openness manifests as a dialectic of the Islamic/non-Islamic—and, more specifically, the Islamic/pre-Islamic.

In al-Rihla, this dialectic unfolds as a formal problem: the adaptation of a Qur’anic story to the narrative norms of the Japanese action-adventure genre known as the battle shonen. Islam, as an ethic and a discourse, is deployed to resolve the series of contradictions unleashed by this adaptational process—a process which encodes the simultaneous localism and globalism of its production. The result is a synoptic screening of the new Saudi nationalism.

Deus Ex Genus

Let us begin with the plot. From one vantage point, the story of Abraha’s attempted invasion of Mecca in 580 A.D. comes prefabricated for propagandistic reassembly. One does not need to edit it too heavily to yield a patriotic, appropriately xenophobic fable: a ragtag group of (Saudi) warriors fight to defend their city (homeland) against deviant foreign invaders.

Al-Rihla’s contradictory rendition of “foreignness” undermines any such straightforward reading. Abraha and his men, for instance, seem to have wandered off the pages of the Shonen Jump fantasy manga for which they were evidently designed. Their aesthetic anachronism enacts their paradoxical function: demonizing them as a terrifying “Other”—Abyssinia narratively, Japan visually—yet, by the very conspicuity of their inclusion, performing a stylistic “openness” to the rest of the world. Zurara, on the side of our heroes, further develops this dialectic of insularity/openness: a deuteragonist as aesthetically foreign as the invaders he is fighting.

This same antinomy is effected by the battle scenes that comprise much of al-Rihla’s second half. Though the film’s animators attempted to indigenize character dress, body language, and overall visual language so as to create an authentically “Arab” experience, little of this effort is visible in the action choreography. Impossible feats of athleticism, tongue-in-cheek bantering amidst fighting, dramatic sword swings and delayed blood sprays, overwrought declarations of shock at the protagonists’ skill by two-bit players—even a casual consumer of anime is likely to recognize this as standardshonen fare. None of this would seem remotely out of place in Demon Slayer or One Piece. Mecca’s defenders enact their heroism through an aesthetics of action lifted from beyond Mecca, and beyond Arabia.

The shonenesque qualities of the action alerts us to al-Rihla’s location in the genre of battle shonen, populated by the likes of Dragon Ball and Naruto. The usual generic suspects are here—a determined underdog protagonist driven by love for his companions; an estranged and cynical friend-turned-rival-turned-friend-again; characters characterized almost entirely by their tragic backstories; the list goes on. The secondary characters, too, manifest familiar archetypes, from Nizar, the skilled but simple-minded fighter, to Hisham, the well-meaning but clumsy source of comic relief.

The film’s adoption of shonen generic conventions is a problem in the context of its source material. The Qur’anic Chapter of the Elephant is not about the unlikely heroism of a rag-tag band of defenders—it is about God protecting His house. Abaraha, accordingly, is defeated not by human agency but Divine wrath. Indeed, no band of defenders even features in the Qur’anic account, which concludes in the same manner as the Greek plays of antiquity: divine intervention. Yet to tell a superhero story in which the superheroes do not save the day but rather rely on an all-powerful plot device—in this case, literally God—would represent, by the standards of both generic convention and modern literary criticism, an offensive failure of storytelling.

Al-Rihla is thus torn between two distinct narrative paradigms—between an anthropocentric epic anchored in the self-actualization of exceptional individuals and a theocentric parable about Divine sovereignty over all things. What is a deus ex machina in the former is the rational and necessary climax in the latter; it is, narratively and morally, the point.

The film resolves this fundamental tension by thematizing it. In each of the film’s three major acts, at the moment when hope seems lost, a character—Aws, his wife Hind, and his adoptive father Jubayr, in that order—relates an Abrahamic story: Noah and the Flood, Moses splitting the Red Sea, and the destruction of Prophet Hud’s people, known as ‘Aad. In each case, the unbreakable will and unwavering faith of the prophets’ followers is connected to their eventual salvation at God’s hands.

Al-Rihla thus becomes a story about tawakkul, a dramatization of the Prophetic tradition in which the Prophet Muhammad advised a companion to tie his camel to a tree and then leave matters in the hands of God. Faith, as expressed through prayer, is cast as an act as efficacious as armed warfare. One may want to criticize the film for its gender politics, relegating as it does Hind, the only female character, to the sidelines while foregrounding the violent masculinity of its warring protagonists, but ultimately Aws and his fellow fighters must resort to what Hind does: prayer. It is the fervency of that prayer, and the strength of faith it reflects, that brings about Divine salvation in the form of a sky-blackening swarm of stone-armed birds.

There is an Islamic specificity to al-Rihla’s articulation of this idea. While the first two Prophetic “flashbacks” (Noah and Moses) could have come from a Jewish or Christian production, the story of ‘Aad is particular to the Qur’an; only with its inclusion does the trilogy of Prophetic tales go from biblical to Islamic. The story of ‘Aad is narrated with frequent (but unmarked) Qur’anic quotations. Jubayr, in the Arabic dub, calls ‘Aad’s city by its Qur’anic name (“Iram of the pillars,” from 89:7), and he quotes various verses when describing its destruction (54:20, 3:160, 54:42, 89:8).

For all that, al-Rihla is not interested in being an “Islamic” film, and its highly visible “Islam” does not necessarily serve an “Islamic” function. We can begin to see this in how the film frames the historical meaning of Abraha’s miraculous defeat. God only sends down such miracles to mark the opening of epochs, Abd al-Muttalib reflects, and so in the final scene he declares the dawning of a new age—“an age filled with light, arriving to dispel the darkness that preceded it.”³ This is as close as the film gets to acknowledging the broader Islamic significance of the Year of the Elephant: as the year of Muhammad’s birth, it represents the opening of the Islamic chapter of human history, perhaps the opening of Islam itself. The film’s indirect prophesizing of the imminent Prophet is issued by no less than the Prophet’s paternal grandfather, ‘Abd al-Muttalib.

Yet the name of Muhammad is never uttered, nor the coming advent of Islam in any other way suggested. So minor is ‘Abd al-Muttalib’s line that it does not even appear in the Japanese dub. Al-Rihla thus makes for a striking contrast with the other most recent animated retelling of the Year of the Elephant, the 2012 short film Before the Light.⁴ As suggested by its title, the film is a prequel to the 2002 animated film Muhammad: The Last Prophet, architected by former Disney director Richard Rich and his now-defunct Rich Animation Studios.⁵ Thus the entire film is framed in relation to the events that follow it, by which it justifies its own existence. The Prophet’s parents Abdullah and Aamina feature prominently, and Before the Light concludes not with Abraha’s defeat but the Prophet’s birth.

In al-Rihla, meanwhile, the Prophet is an absence so conspicuous as to be a structuring presence. He is the great Negative through which al-Rihla works its reinterpretation of the opening chapter of Islamic history.

Nominal Narratives

The trilogy of Prophetic tales, the thematic lynchpin of the film, is naturally the site where this operation is most visible. Observe that these Prophetic stories are not Prophetic stories as such—they are narrated not from the perspective of the prophets, as in the Qur’an, but from that of their followers. In each case we are given a downtrodden everyman with whom to identify—Naram the shepherd, Rahil the slave girl, and Thawab the rebel. To take these individuals as our protagonists, all anonymous members of the social underclass, is to democratize what are originally Campbellian monomyths. The absence of prophets from these Prophetic tales mirrors the absence of Prophet Muhammad from al-Rihla itself, which subjects the Chapter of the Elephant to a similarly democratic surgery.

This returns us to the tension between the film’s anthropocentric and theocentric narrative frameworks, and the thematic of tawwakul meant to resolve it. Yet the tension refuses resolution. Consider Abraha’s demise. Generic convention calls for a final showdown between our main protagonist and antagonist, especially since the former had been defeated in their initial confrontation but promised revenge. Yet having Abraha escape Divine punishment only to meet his end at the hands of Aws seems thematically (and theologically) problematic. In such a scenario, the Meccans prevail not through a miraculous answer to their faith, but good old-fashioned heroics.

The film’s solution to this dilemma only exacerbates it. Abraha challenges Aws to a one-on-one duel that the latter accepts, but is prematurely crushed by God’s swarm of birds. Right before Abraha is crushed to death, we are treated to a dramatic slow-motion shot of Aws’s bloodied, stoic face as he tells Abraha: “Remember the name: Aws ibn Jubayr.”

This might be the most jarring moment in the film. It takes the climactic fulfillment of the story’s Divine miracle, to which the entire narrative had been building through its retelling of biblical history, and makes it about Aws—as if it were he who crushed Abraha. In a sense he was, insofar as his fervent prayers helped bring about God’s miracle, but it would be absurd, indeed blasphemous, to suggest that Aws’ agency as a faithful servant supersedes that of God. The film’s insistence on heroizing its protagonist, in keeping with shonen convention, momentarily converts the normally devout Aws to a narcissist claiming credit for Divine intervention.

Yet it is here that we see, laid bare, the film’s central ideological strategy: the sacralization of secular national ideals through the mobilization of the ethical and affective resources of Islam. This strategy is effectively verbalized by the last line in the film. Right after ‘Abd al-Muttalib declares the dawning of a new age of light, in the film’s only allusion to Prophet Muhammad, Hind celebrates the sight of literal rays of sunlight penetrating through the clouds. She draws Jubayr’s attention to this joyful portent, upon which he proudly declares: “Yes, without a doubt, it’s the light of Aws.” The allusion to Muhammad is thus immediately displaced by Aws—or more precisely, it is displaced onto Aws, as was done with the Divine destruction of Abraha.

This strategy of displacement is how al-Rihla repurposes its Islamic groundings. “We must tell the tale of this miracle to our descendants, like the predecessors before us,” declares Aws in his very last line. Thus al-Rihla casts its own retelling of Abraha’s invasion as the fulfillment of a moral imperative to remember and honor the ancestors. In so doing the film subverts the traditional historiographic function of the Year of the Elephant by rendering it in terms of continuity rather than rupture. Far from marking a decisive break with the past, the occasion of Abraha’s invasion becomes yet another pearl in a long, unbroken necklace of history proudly worn by the Saudi nation—and it is specifically the Saudi nation which wears this necklace, because every Prophet-less narrative “remembered” by al-Rihla took place on the same land as its own Prophet-less narrative: Arabia.

This geographic imaginary, implicit in the film’s framing, is made explicit by its title. While al-Rihla has been officially translated as The Journey, it can just as easily be understood as a reference to the Arabic literary genre of the rihla—that is, the travelogue. This genre is further invoked by the name of our protagonist, Aws ibn Jubayr; none other than the Arab geographer Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) famously chronicled his travels from al-Andalus to Mecca. That work, alongside al-Rihla of Ibn Battuta (d. 1369), became a prototype of the rihla genre, known for its lush descriptions of the monuments and marvels of distant lands.

For the Saudi viewer, al-Rihla plays as an inverted travelogue. The exoticizing gaze of the genre is turned inwards and backwards—“the past is a foreign country,” even and especially the local past, and therefore suitable material for a rihla. (Saudi) Arabia is re-enchanted, because exoticized, through al-Rihla’s journey to its own sacred past—visualized in the trilogy of Prophetic fables. The wondrous, mythological atmosphere of these “flashbacks” is achieved through several stylistic departures, most notably the use of quasi-psychedelic colors and nearly-frozen frames. The recounted past is further exoticized by the incorporation of popular folklore, such as the enduring (but scripturally ungrounded) notion that the people of ‘Ad were giants equal in size to the towering columns of their city. Yet it is precisely such folkloric inclusions that render the depicted past at least somewhat familiar.⁶ As an inverted travelogue, then, al-Rihla at once estranges the Saudi viewer from their national past and draws them closer to it,⁷ defamiliarizing said past by casting it in the vernacular of myth even as it translates the resultant sense of wonder into a sense of national pride.⁸

Time is space and topography is history, and this is especially the case in these Prophetic stories, each of which foreground iconic locations invested with immense religious meaning: Mount Judi,⁹ the Red Sea, and Iram of the Pillars. The film’s subtitle, even more than its title, confirms this geographic fixation and betrays its greater purpose: “The Story of Miracles and Battles on the Ancient Arabian Peninsula.” This is al-Rihla’s true gambit, the tying of the miraculous stories about tawakkul to the landscape of Arabia. This is “Arabia” very broadly defined—Mount Judi, for instance, today stands in Turkey, near Syria and Iraq. Lest this be mistaken for any kind of political iconoclasm, understand that al-Rihla disregards modern-day borders only insofar as it can claim sacred geography for Saudi Arabia, as demarcated by its current borders. This is al-Rihla’s strategy—to displace the sacrality of the film’s Qur’anic tales onto Arabia, and more specifically Saudi Arabia.

The celebration of Arabian geography has been a central tenet of bin Salman’s national project. The ruins of al-Ula and Madain Saleh, long demonized as pre-Islamic monuments to paganism, have been rehabilitated as profitable tourist attractions and proud symbols of Saudi heritage. Al-Rihla participates in this rehabilitative effort.

Indeed, more than just participate, al-Rihla develops a specifically Islamic justification for celebrating pre-Islamic peoples and integrating them into Saudi Arabia’s self-narrative. The film effects this particular end circuitously: it recounts various Qur’anic stories about God’s destruction of disbelieving peoples, but redeems those same disbelieving peoples by centering the minority among them that did answer the prophetic call. The ruins of a pagan tribe like ‘Aad, presented in the Qur’an as a warning to future generations (26:139, 27:69), is through the thematic alchemy of tawakkul transmuted into a national icon. The very destruction by which pre-Islamic pagans were condemned is reinterpreted as the deliverance by which they are redeemed—“a miracle granted to the brave, who refused to give up,” in the words of Aws. Thus, the film casts Aws, and indeed all the Meccans of jahiliya, as the latest heroes in a chain of (Saudi) Arabian heroes extending back to Naram in the time of Noah.

Aws captures in microcosm al-Rihla’s rehabilitation of the pre-Islamic past. Recall that Aws, though the film’s main and best defender of Mecca, is not himself natively Meccan. Aws is adopted, a fact about which the film never stops reminding us. This celebratory emphasis on adoption aligns al-Rihla with the ethos of pre-Islamic Arabia. Islam, after all, famously abolished the institution of adoption.

Raising someone else’s child, especially an orphan, is permissible and even encouraged in Islam; what is not permissible is said child taking their foster parents’ names. Yet this is precisely what Aws does, per the custom of the pre-Islamic Arabs. The film does not simply present this as matter of historical fact—it actively valorizes it by centering the adopted family of Aws, enshrining them as his motivation for defending Mecca, and highlighting the deep pride he takes in becoming the son of Jubayr. Remember the name!

Aws thus personifies the dialectic of insularity/openness which governs the film. His narrative position as a naturalized foreigner doubles as a formal fusion of Arabia’s Islamic and pre-Islamic heritages.¹⁰ The Saudi state, through al-Rihla, performs national “openness” not just through anime aesthetics and shonen conventions, but more fundamentally through the redemption of its own pagan past.

That the “Saudi nation” even has a pagan past to “redeem” is of course an ahistorical absurdity, but that is precisely the point of this exercise. To approach Arabia’s pagan history as a “problem” for national identity is to already claim it for the nation. Al-Rihla’s very staging of this problematic, never mind its resolution, reifies the Saudi state as identical with the “Arabian peninsula” on one hand and “Islam” on the other. Through its aforementioned strategy of displacement, al-Rihla invents a new national “place”—a sacred geography which makes present progenitor and progeny; which locates, in every mountain and every ruin, history and posterity.

Re-Islamizing the Future

It is this eternalization of the Saudi “nation,” then, that may have motivated Manga Productions’ decision to open its filmography with an adaptation of the Qur’an’s 105^th chapter. In the context of the Saudi state’s national project, the Year of the Elephant is a temporal goldilocks zone: a fertile liminal space between Islamic and pre-Islamic history, and thus an ideal space for reconciling its competing pagan and Ishmaelite heritages—in much the same fashion as modern Egyptian nationalists have occasionally attempted to reconcile the Pharaonic past and the Muslim present.¹¹

Thus al-Rihla, in both form and content, is not just the new Saudi nationalism in microcosm—it is an answer key to, even a subconscious expression of, its underlying drives and objectives. The Saudi state seemingly cannot move forward with its new national project without resolving the contradictions of its Islamic identity. It must “open” its new national chapter by rewriting the “opening” of Islam itself.

As I have tried to show, it would be a mistake to term the resulting nationalism “secular” in any naively “non-religious” sense, precisely because it is manufactured in an Islamic idiom. The new Saudi nationalism is to Islam what the Moon is to the Sun; a smaller, newer entity which borrows the light of an older and much more powerful source. In a sense, the new nationalism is but a modification of the “religious nationalism” originally promoted by the Saudi state in 1932. One can very well argue that this religiously sanctioned nationalism has never been retired by the ruling elite at any point since—only reshuffled and reordered.

Rather than “de-islamization,” bin Salman’s national project, like those of Saudi rulers before him, is a “re-islamization,” a “rewriting” of Islam. Far from simply “reigning in” Islam, bin Salman is converting it to a “religion”—not just in some privatized Protestant sense, but in something akin to Robert Bellah’s notion of “civil religion.” Such a “nationalism” is derivative of but distinct from Islam, in which case the key distinction is not between nationalism and religion, but religion and Islam.

Al-Rihla was just the start. The ideological and formal maneuvers by which the film re-islamized the Saudi past—the grounding of national identity in an enchanted topography, the temporal universalization of the Saudi state through its spatialization—feature in the other animated projects on the Manga Productions assembly line.

The first season of its television series Future’s Folktales is set in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, while the second will be set in NEOM, the planned $500-billion mega-city to be constructed along the Red Sea. Grandmother Asmaa, living in a futuristic Riyadh populated by robots and spaceports, entertains her grandchildren by relating traditional Arabian folktales. This frame story, vaguely evocative of Shahrazad and The Thousand and One Nights, simultaneously projects (Saudi) Arabia into the far past and the far future—the eternal continuity of the Saudi nation suggested by al-Rihla’s themes of folk memory (and its transmission) is more directly realized here. Also like al-Rihla, the act of oral storytelling is within the narrative thematized as a moral must—and so the series itself, by retelling these stories, casts itself as a moral good.¹²

Beyond Future’s Folktales, Manga Productions has announced a reboot of the iconic anime series Grendizer, secured distribution rights for Captain Tsubasa (known as “Captain Majid” in the Arab world) and Great Pretender Razbliuto, and pursued partnerships with entertainment companies in South Korea and China.

The results of such international courtship speak for themselves. Al-Rihla is not some obscure, low-level production. Director Kobun Shinozu has multiple entries in the blockbuster Detective Conan film franchise; prolific screenwriter Atsuhiro Tomioka has authored many scripts for One Piece, Pokemon, and Dragon Ball; and the Japanese voice cast can only be described as star-studded.¹³ Even only in terms of the experience and profile of its production team, never mind its production cost and distributional reach, Al-Rihla is an unprecedented moment for Arab animation.¹⁴

The film is, in some ways, the Platonic ideal of the new Saudi nationalism: a fruit of international collaboration, of cultural and economic “openness,” that nonetheless illustrates the particular genius of some exclusive and essential Saudi nation. The long-term sustainability of this dialectical strategy of nation-building—this simultaneous cultivation and denial of difference—is an open question.

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Notes

1. In 2020, Netflix signed a five-year exclusive partnership with Myrkott, a Riyadh-based studio and creator of Masameer, a popular YouTube series, to produce Saudi-focused animated shows for worldwide distribution—to say nothing of the many Saudi Arabian live-action films and television produced for the streaming giant. On the gaming front, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) has purchased stakes in Nintendo, Capcom, Nexon, Activision Blizzard, and beyond. Savvy Games Group (SGG), a subsidiary of PIF, has spent billions on stakes and gaming acquisitions, with plans to spend much more—$38 billion, to be exact, aiming to transform the country into a global gaming hub. That said, not every move has met with success. In May 2023, SGG walked away from a $2 billion game development deal with Embracer Group, a Swedish holding company. Embracer had already received a $1 billion investment from PIF the year prior. Embracer’s stock price plummeted in the wake of the debacle.

2. MiSK is not the first Arab company to recognize the strategic boon of adopting anime as an aesthetic—the first “Arab anime” was technically Badr, a 2017 animated series broadcast on Jeem TV and produced by Miramax following its purchase by the Al Jazeera-owned Bein Media Group. The conscious choice to produce the cartoon in the style of anime speaks to the widely-recognized popularity of the medium in the Arab world, a recognition which MiSK clearly factored into its calculations when it began production of Al-Rihla the same year that Badr aired.

3. This reference to the previous dark age apparently does not appear in the Japanese dub.

4. Possibly the earliest attempt to animate the Year of the Elephant— a short film bearing, in a somewhat uncanny coincidence, the title Rihlatu Salam (Salam’s Journey)—framed Abraha’s campaign by the story of the fictional Salam, an adventurous young boy who befriends a kind elephant named Mahmoud. The central twist of the story is that Mahmoud is captured and forced into leading Abraha’s Mecca-bound army of elephants.

5. Rich founded the company in 1986. For non-Muslim audiences, his most famous film is probably The Fox and the Hound or (less popularly) The Black Cauldron.

6. This tall tale about ‘Aad has evidently enjoyed a long career—already in the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was lambasting it as a fanciful absurdity. The columns of Iram need not reflect the heights of their builders, argued Ibn Khaldun, only their social organization and mechanical dexterity. See Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 16.

7. For the non-Saudi viewer, meanwhile, the film plays as a straightforward travelogue. Come learn about Saudi Arabian culture and history, come marinate in this marvelous and strange world—that is the sell.

8. We might read this dialectic of estrangement/familiarization as yet another variant of the film’s master dialectic of insularity/openness.

9. Both Christian and Islamic tradition identify third as the final resting place of Noah’s Ark.

10. That our protagonist may be named after, or even himself be, a relatively obscure, real-life companion of the Prophet only reinforces this link. Not much is recorded in extant biographical dictionaries about the Companion named Aws ibn Jubayr, beyond his martyrdom in the Battle of Khaybar in 628. The battle occurred seven years after the Hijra, which means Aws was plausibly old enough to have been around prior to the beginning of the Prophet’s mission—thus straddling both the pre-Islamic and Islamic eras.

11. For a history of Pharaonism in Egyptian discourses of identity and its tensions with Islam, see Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, and Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). While Pharaonism receded from the politico-cultural mainstream after its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, overtaken by the nationalist alternatives of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism, it has been strategically revived by the regime of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Unlike Saudi Arabia, however, the Egyptian state has mostly ignored the question of Islam in its recuperation of the pagan past.

12. It seems likely that this will be how Manga Productions frames in ethical terms its more overtly nationalist projects. It has already set about producing manga series (and manga-style animations) about the founding of the Saudi state.

13. Virtually every name on the roster has voiced an iconic character, or several—Toru Furuya (Amuro, Gundam), Hiroshi Kamiya (Levi Ackerman, Attack on Titan), Kazuya Nakai (Zoro, One Piece), Kotono Mitsuishi (Misato, Neon Genesis Evangelion), Yuichi Nakamura (Satoru Gojo, Jujutsu Kaisen).

14. However, al-Rihla’s crew is also more blockbuster than auteur. While al-Rihla won Best Experimental Film at the Septimius Awards—for the first time in the history of Arab film, as Bukhari likes to remind his interviewers—what matters more to its creators is its popularity. The interest here is less in “high art,” whatever that might be, than it is in al-Rihla being on 52 platforms globally, being the first ever Arab and Saudi film to feature on a Chinese platform, and being the IP that had the most likes on Netflix in June 2021 in MENA. The goal, in other words, is Saudi “soft power”; Saudi nationalism as international affirmation.