PARABLES STUDIO DROPS FIRST LOOK AT "OPEMSUO OSEI TUTU I" CONCEPT ART_17Th CENTURY KUMASI BREATHES AGAIN

Parables Animation Studios just revealed the world behind “Opemsuo Osei Tutu I, Birth of an Empire”, and it's Kumasi breathing again.

The film tells the story of how the Asante Kingdom, one of the greatest empires on the African continent, came to be and its first king, Osei Tutu I. This first look focuses entirely on the background art that brings that world to life.

The team recreated pre-colonial Kumasi from the ground up: compounds with wattle and-daub walls and palm-thatch roofs, courtyard layouts mapped from oral accounts, and sacred forests rendered with botanical accuracy. Light falls differently in these spaces — not just for mood, but to reflect how people moved, worked, and gathered at different times of day.

Every texture and spatial detail came from months of work by dedicated artists collaborating directly with historians and curators at the Manhyia Palace Museum.

They provided oral accounts, archival references, and cultural protocol to make sure the

environment reflects lived memory, not imagination.

“The intention is to give a good picture of the culture that existed then, relived on the screen for the audience to see and appreciate how well advanced we were,” says Ivor Agyeman-Duah, Director of the museum. “Manhyia Palace is happy to share this opportunity to promote and preserve a rich African story and heritage.”

The Art director, Jeffrey Kwesi Abban, indicated that the goal was to show how a typical Asante community actually lived, moved, and built, so the environment itself tells the history of the kingdom’s origins. The result is background art that doesn’t just sit behind the story, it tells it. You see the rhythm of a community, the logic of its architecture, and the quiet dignity of ordinary Asante life in the 17th century.

Release date for the year is yet to be disclosed, but the bar for telling Ghanaian history on screen just got raised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAfgjXSfFeA

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