Bilal: A New Breed of Hero | |
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Directed by | Khurram H. Alavi Ayman Jamal |
Produced by | Ayman Jamal Arif Jilani |
Screenplay by | Alex Kronemer Michael Wolfe Khurram Alavi Yassin Kamel |
Story by | Ayman Jamal |
Starring | Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje Ian McShane China Anne McClain Jacob Latimore Thomas Ian Nicholas Fred Tatasciore Michael Gross |
Music by | Atli Örvarsson |
Edited by | Patricia Heneine |
Barajoun Entertainment | |
Distributed by | Vertical Entertainment[1] |
| |
109 minutes | |
Country | United Arab Emirates[1] |
Language | English |
Budget | $30 million[2] |
Bilal: A New Breed of Hero is a 2015 English-language Arabic 3Dcomputer-animatedaction-adventure film produced by Barajoun Entertainment and co-directed by Khurram H. Alavi and Ayman Jamal. With a story by Jamal, the screenplay was written by Alavi, Alex Kronemer, Michael Wolfe and Yassin Kamel. With this film, Jamal aimed to depict heroes from the history of the Arabian Peninsula.
The film depicts the life of Bilal ibn Rabah, who, known for his beautiful voice, was freed from slavery and rose to a position of prominence in 632 AD. The voice cast features Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ian McShane, China Anne McClain, Jacob Latimore, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Fred Tatasciore, Cynthia McWilliams, Jon Curry, Dave B. Mitchell and Michael Gross.
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Bilal premiered on December 9, 2015, at the 12th Annual International Dubai Film Festival. Starting September 8, 2016, the film released throughout the MENA region. The film began an international rollout in February 2018.
Bilal won 'Best Inspiring Movie' on Animation Day at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It won 'Best Innovative Movie' at the BroadCast Pro Middle East Award 2016. Bilal was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2016 Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA), the region's highest accolade for film.
Bilal lived a peaceful life with his mother and his younger sister until soldiers came and enslaved them and killed his mother.
He became a slave to the richest man in the city, Umayyah. While getting water for his master, he encountered the Priest, who tricked people to give their money with promises that the idols will grant their desires.
In another part of town, Safwan, Umayyah's son, was bullying Ghufaira, Bilal's sister and was about to shoot her with an arrow when Bilal intervened and saved her. Umayyah heard about it and reminded Bilal of his status before ordering the guards to whip him. Umayyah slapped Safwan for losing to a slave and embarrassing him.
One day, Bilal met and befriended a white horse, whom he rode until he reached adulthood. He became friends with Saad, an archer. On his way back to Umayyah's place, he stopped a hungry young boy from stealing from the idol's bowl as he wanted the boy to not get whipped. He gave the boy his food instead. His act of kindness was seen by Abu Bakr, a man who believed in equality for everyone and saw greatness in Bilal. However, Bilal doubted him and his beliefs.
When he was told to sing at Umayyah's feast, he realized something. He went back Abu Bakr the next day to ask for clarity and accepted his beliefs that there was only one God.
At the next feast, a merchant warned Umayyah of the new movement opposing them. Bilal then defied Umayyah and was taken to a cage where he was tortured everyday until one day Umayyah came and offered him an opportunity to be a spy for the enemy. Bilal did not yield, and was taken to a court where he was chained. A huge rock was put on top of him to slowly crush him, but he was saved as Abu Bakr bought him.
Ghufaira, however, belonged to Safwan, who did not want to sell her at all. Because of this, Bilal learned how to fight from Hamza, the leader of the movement. When they came back to Meccah, Safwan sent Bilal a lock of Ghufaira's hair. Bilal immediately rode to the slave town, followed by Hamza. They found the town on fire and a lot of slaves dead. Bilal hurried to Safwan's place and was caught by the guards.
Safwan flipped him a bloody coin to imply that his sister was dead before ordering the guards to kill him. Hamza saved him, and they both rode out of town.
A year later, they were ready, and Umayyah declared war on them. In the midst of the fight, Bilal managed to kill Umayyah.
This story spread fast in every city and the angry Safwan prepared for revenge with his troops in various cities.
Sometime later, the city was now all on Bilal's side. The Priest was dead, and every city had turned on Safwan except the base, Meccah. Bilal confronted Safwan, and asked why he had to kill Ghufaira. It was then revealed that Ghufaira was alive. Bilal once said that in his belief, a man was judged by his actions, so there she was, Safwan's one act of morality.
Bilal and Ghufaira reunited. Safwan then came out to see Bilal call for prayer.
Ayman Jamal pursued the project for over seven years, doing intense research in order to pay homage to the countless historical accounts and descriptions of the characters and set locations in the movie. He finally founded Barajoun Entertainment in 2013, establishing the company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It was truly challenging for Jamal to both open an animation studio and develop the animated feature simultaneously, as both endeavors were the first of their kind within the MENA region. State of the art facilities were employed in the pursuit of industry standard content development, enabling Barajoun to deliver a movie that is on par with any international animated feature.
The film features an ensemble of highly detailed and imaginative elements. It boasts a stylized world with complex characters, setups, props, and environments.
As a character the presence of the Falcon was as a companion of Hamza the warrior. The Falcon in Arabic literature and culture is a representation of authenticity, pride and bravery.[5]
Special Programming Scripts were used in order to achieve the hyper realistic animation of the falcon as it folded (and spread) its wings. The falcon rig setup was made up of a number of joints and controls which allowed the animators to deliver a hyper realistic animation performance for the bird's neck movement. Each wing hosted close to 150 controls for the feather sets only. Getting the wings to look correct during the action of folding and unfolding was no easy challenge either.[5]
The rig is undoubtedly the most complex setup Barajoun built for the film. Each shot of the falcon in the film took over 5 terabytes.[5]
This battle scene in Bilal is the longest in animation history. Conventionally, each frame can only hold 7 items in animation.[5]
The battle scene held a grand total of 310 figures, including weaponry, warriors, and horses. It was so ambitious that many crew members left believing that it could not be done. The remaining team, however, did not give up. They hired actual Chinese warriors to act out the battle for the perfect animation.[5]
Apart from the technical mastery it took to create them, the animals that appear in the movie create a beautiful symbolic message. The horse to Bilal was a symbolic representation of courage, power and strength. The idea of having a wooden horse toy as a child represented a dream of being a warrior. He grew up trying to master a white horse in the stable, and up until he learnt how to gallop through sand dunes and tread long distances, he had to be patient. This whole process of waiting and enduring being thrown off the horse many times, is the process of Bilal turning into a warrior himself.[5]
The production team at Barajoun researched and created case studies of horses that were available at that historical era. The team went later to Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid equestrian club, as he holds one of the most extensive horse collections in the world, and they built the horse's research database there. The Arabian horse was a point of reference, so the art team took it from there, visualizing stylized interpretation of the majestic animal. Numerous patterns and landmarks were incorporated into the design of these beasts, so that every horse had a presence of its own. Heavy research on the mannerisms of actual horses were undertaken by Barajoun's animation wing for a span of three months. The same was employed by the FX team taking them two years to develop the complex fur, rig, and animation.[5]
Every horse has more than two million hair strands, making it take over four hours to render a single frame. The complex rig contained nearly 1000 controls along with the skeletal and muscle systems. The epic “Battle of Badr” used anywhere from 50 to 1000 of these horses in most of its shots.[5]
The music was composed by Atli Örvarsson, with additional music by Claudio Olachea, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studio. Örvarsson employed a unique blend of Icelandic music fused with Oriental music in order to develop a language that spoke to a wider audience. Music recording and mixing engineering on the show was done by Steve McLaughlin. Stephen Gallagher performed mix duties during the final mix of the show, also producing the song 'Distant Shadows', with lyrics by Khurram H. Alavi.
The musical score and sound design were mixed and finalised at Peter Jackson's Park Road Post in Wellington, New Zealand. The final mix was handled by academy award-winning Michael Hedges and his team of seasoned PRP engineers.
A special screening was held at the Ajyal Youth Film Festival in Doha, Qatar on November 9, 2015. The film premiered at the 12th Annual Dubai International Film Festival on December 9, 2015. It continued its festival circuit over the course of 2016 being screened in Berlin, Cannes, Annecy, and Toronto. It was released in cinemas all across the MENA region. It was scheduled to be released in the US and other parts of the world on February 2, 2018.
The film has been also released in Turkey dubbed the lead character Bilal by Engin Altan Duzyatan.[clarification needed][6] Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the premiere show and highly praised the film.[7][8]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 57% based on 30 commercial reviews (86% on Audience), and an average rating of 5.9/10 (Audience: 4/5) .[9] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 52 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating 'mixed or average reviews'.[10]
The film was officially selected at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival under Best Feature Film. It was also nominated for APSA, the region's highest accolade in film for Best Animated Feature Film after winning 'Best inspiring Movie' in Animation Day in Cannes Festival and 'Best Innovative Movie' at the BroadCast Pro Middle East Award.
“BILAL: A New Breed of Hero”, was about hope and self-discovery. Also nominated “Best Animated Feature Film” at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) and screened at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, USA last March 2017. BILAL is presently in the list for 100 best animated feature films of all times, as well as in the Top 10 of 2018 list of animated movies on IMDB. Needless to say, it has earned some good reviews too!