Venus Fouad has been joining her children in front of the TV this Ramadan Everyone, and not only children, loves to watch animated films in Ramadan, and this is why some of the country's most talented directors dedicate their careers to this art form. The late director Mona Abul Nasr gave us Bakkar, one of the most popular Ramadan shows of all time. Zeinab Zamzam, another director, became well-known for her Play-Doh serial animations. Combine cartoon with Quranic tales, and you what you get is a surefire Ramadan hit. This year's show, Quranic Tales of People, follows in the footsteps of Quranic Tales of Animals, shown last year. The producers are planning a sequel series for next year, Quranic Tales of Inanimate Matter. Television viewers following this year's 30 episodes will become acquainted with 10 tales each covered in three episodes: The Namrud; The Burning Ditch; The Gardens; Talut and Galut; The Two-Horned Man; Yagog and Magog; The Pharaonic Monotheist and three others. The show, directed by Mostafa El-Faramawi, introduces new techniques and avoids some of the flaws of last year's work. The frame story is that of a boat captain, Galaleddin, and Ziyad, a child who has stowed away on his boat. Other characters on the boat, such as the sailors Loulou and Morgan, provide comic relief. The show begins with Galaleddin, played by popular actor Yehia El-Fakharani, battling a terrible storm that almost sinks his boat. In the middle of his desperate attempts to keep his boat afloat, Galaleddin discovers the stowaway. Not knowing exactly what to do with the child on his ship, the captain begins to entertain him with tales of ancient times, as told in the Qur'an. The first such tale, The Burning Ditch, is about early monotheists who are thrown into the fire as punishment for abandoning the religion of their tribe. Miraculously, they survive. The second tale is that of Talut and Galut (the Biblical David and Goliath), a story of the triumph of the downtrodden told with magnificent simplicity by the avuncular Fakharani. The animation is truly gripping and the music adds force to the presentation, although at times it takes an overly dramatic turn for no reason. The title song for this year, performed by Hussein El-Gasemi, is somewhat less effective than last year's song by Ahmad Saad. The delivery of Nabil Shoeil seems a little over the top, even for a children's show based on religious tales. The language, a simplified form of standard Arabic, is brilliantly appropriate for the target audience of children aged between seven and 14. The show is aired exclusively on Al-Hayat TV right before Iftar, which is not the best time for concentration as most families are usually busy getting food on the table. Aside from aFakharani, the cast includes some of the most popular actors in Egypt and the Arab world: Sherif Mounir, Ahmed El-Saadani, Salaha Abdallaha, Maged El-Kedwani, Lotfi Labib, Ahmad Rateb and Hala Fakher, along with child actors Ahmed Khaled and Hashem Hani. I would welcome a move to allow the show to be used in schools for education purposes, since it would break the monotony of what tends to be a tedious religious curriculum, one that falls short of the imagination of young children. I am also pleased that the tales selected for this show illustrate how sympathetic the Qur'an is to other monotheistic religions, especially Christianity. Quranic Tales of People is based on Tales of Animals and Humans in the Qur'an, a collection of books by the well-known author Ahmad Bahgat, who wrote the script for the show.
