In 2017, two friends in Lagos who shared a fascination with animation decided to build a studio around it. Adeoyin Okuboyejo, who had studied computer science at the University of Aberdeen before teaching himself the craft of 3D storytelling, co-founded Taeps Animation Studios with Ayobami Bello on a simple premise: African stories, told with the same technical polish as anything coming out of a major studio, deserved a global audience.
For years, that meant small, deliberate steps. The breakthrough came with Ewa, a short film about a boy’s comic mission to grow taller before school resumes by eating beans. It found an audience well beyond Nigeria, drawing more than 100,000 views on YouTube and a nomination for Best Animation Short Film at the African Film Festival (AFRIFF) in 2023. It was a small film with a specific, personal premise, and it was enough to get noticed.
In June 2024, that notice arrived in the form of Ukonwa Ojo, the former chief marketing officer of Amazon’s Prime Video and Studios. Her venture studio, Zaia Ventures, took a stake in Taeps, and Ojo joined its advisory board, lending the company strategic and marketing guidance as it prepared to scale.
Ojo’s résumé made the deal a notable one for a young African studio to land. Over a 27-year career, she had held senior marketing roles at Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser and General Mills, served as Brand President at COVERGIRL, and led global marketing at M.A.C Cosmetics before joining Amazon. At Prime Video and Amazon Studios, she ran the team behind the marketing campaigns for eight of the platform’s ten most-watched titles, work that included award-winning campaigns for films and series such as “Coming 2 America” and “The Boys.” She left Amazon in 2022 to found Zaia Ventures, a venture studio rather than a fund, built specifically to develop and back businesses serving underrepresented communities.
What drew her to Taeps, she said at the time, was a shared ambition to amplify African voices and narratives in the world of animation. For Okuboyejo, the partnership marked a turning point: with Ojo’s backing, the studio could move from short films to something far more ambitious, its first feature.
That feature, Adétóún and the Heart of Time, became the studio’s most significant undertaking. The story follows Adétóún, a young descendant of an ancient warrior, whose arrival sets off the resurgence of a revered relic and draws her into a battle for supremacy that threatens to alter the course of time. It is a 3D feature built around themes of ancestry, heritage and bravery, the same instincts that shaped Ewa, scaled up considerably.
The studio has not slowed down while that feature has been in development. In 2025, Taeps released The Spirit of Dambe, a short film centred on Farouk, a 19-year-old who enters a local Dambe tournament, the traditional Hausa martial art, to save his ailing grandmother and honour his family’s legacy. Rather than simply releasing it online, Taeps took the film on a school tour across Lagos, screening it for students at Corona Schools, MorretVille and the Kids FM Fest as part of a deliberate effort to use its films as cultural education, not just entertainment. As Okuboyejo has put it, the studio is not just creating animation; it is preserving cultural identity.
This year, that effort has carried Taeps onto one of the industry’s biggest stages. The studio is part of Animation Nigeria’s delegation to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, exhibiting at the MIFA Market alongside more than a dozen other Nigerian studios, a sign that the bet Ojo made in 2024 is, so far, paying off in visibility if nothing else.
Taeps’ deal with Zaia Ventures did not happen in isolation. It landed amid a broader wave of international interest in African animation: Disney’s “Iwájú,” set in a futuristic reimagining of Lagos, and Cartoon Network’s “Iyanu,” adapted from Roye Okupe’s graphic novel, have both put Nigerian-rooted stories in front of global audiences over the past two years. What sets the Ojo-Taeps deal apart is its scale and origin, not a major studio licensing a finished property, but an industry executive betting early, and directly, on a small founder-led studio still building its first feature.
Whether Adétóún and the Heart of Time delivers on that bet remains to be seen; the film has not yet been dated for release. But for a studio that started with two friends and a shared interest in animation, the distance travelled, from a short film about a boy and his beans to a seat at Annecy’s table, says something about where Nigerian animation, and the people willing to back it, are headed next.
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