The Boy With the Tickle in His Throat

In 2022, I started an animation project with my friend Daliah Latifa Nur. Daliah is a brilliant writer and songwriter, and her debut album, Fragrance of Truth, was on constant rotation when my son was a baby.

She wrote a short story called "The Boy With the Tickle in His Throat," and I immediately saw it as a children’s cartoon. We launched a crowdfunding campaign to develop the music, art, and animation.

But then...

Our crowdfunding goal wasn’t met.

The war on Gaza started.

AI art flooded the scene, cheapening digital art.

I made a choice to stop creating digital art and to concentrate on traditional paintings, which cannot be replaced by AI. 

Daliah and I both worked on fundraising for Palestinian families in Gaza and activism to stop the war. "The Boy With the Tickle in His Throat" fell to the side for a while. 

I am not the same person as I was when I started this project, and the world is not the same place. I wish I had not seen the things I have seen happen to Palestinians in Gaza or known the things I know now. It breaks my heart to know that my 5-year-old son will grow up and read the history books and watch the documentaries about what happened to Gaza. He may, like me, measure his life between a point before he knew and a point after he knew.

Finishing this animation now feels like a marker in time.
It's a reminder of who we were and how the world was before the Gaza genocide. It's also a gift to my son.

All of the art in this video was hand-drawn by me in Photoshop. The story and music were created by humans: Daliah wrote the story, and Tash Nadai created the music and voiceover. 

At the same time that we’ve witnessed such devastating loss of life and innocence, the way these kinds of animations are made now has shifted. The traditional, human-driven process is being replaced by AI that doesn't have messy needs, take the time to daydream or have opinions. It is not a coincidence that the AI revolution and the Gaza genocide unfolded at the same time.

"The Boy With The Tickle in His Throat" is an insistence that even in the middle of witnessing the cruelty of war, we should not lose our capacity for human-created beauty, joy, and imagination.

I hope a piece of the pre-2023 human soul is preserved in this animated story.