Producer Azimjon Rahimjonov discusses Lola Animation, the making of Share Happiness, the growth of Uzbekistan’s animation sector and the studio’s ambitions to reach international audiences.

Azimjon Rahimjonov’s career in film began on the side of a road in Tashkent.

He was 19 and trying to hail a taxi early one morning when he met an experienced cinematographer named Humoyun. The encounter proved unexpectedly consequential: Humoyun took him on as an apprentice at a small studio that mainly filmed weddings, introducing him to editing and cinematography.

Rahimjonov had already been fascinated by directing from a young age, long before he knew what the profession was called. He remembers seeking out complicated films and imagining himself behind the camera. Over time, he worked across editing, cinematography and directing, learned from Uzbek filmmaker Abdukarim Mirzayev and eventually worked in television as an editing director.

His path later took him to Istanbul, where he studied at the Hassan Bin Sabit Cinema Academy. After returning to Tashkent, he joined Najot Ta’lim at a moment when its founder, Temurbek Adhamov, was supporting a grant programme for young people interested in animation.

Adhamov told him something Rahimjonov still remembers: “One day, you will become the person who guides the young people who create this animation.”

“That was how I entered the world of animation,” Rahimjonov tells Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine.

What drew him increasingly towards the medium was its potential influence on children.

“I believe that animated films created for children can have a profound influence on their worldview and upbringing.”

A sentence on a building in Tashkent

The idea for Lola Animation’s short film Share Happiness emerged from another apparently ordinary encounter in the Uzbek capital.

Several years ago, shortly after returning from Türkiye, Rahimjonov was taking one of his regular long walks through central Tashkent. On one of the city’s most expensive streets, he noticed a luxury building under construction carrying the slogan “Share Happiness.”

Standing beside it was a bearded man who appeared to be homeless.

“He was looking at the building with admiration,” Rahimjonov recalls. “There was something childlike and sincere in his expression. It felt as though he, too, wanted to enter that house and live there.”

The image stayed with him.

When his team later decided to make a short animated film as a way of building practical experience, Rahimjonov returned to the idea. The first version of the story followed a girl and an older man who secretly entered a luxurious home and pretended to be its owners. As the project developed, the setting shifted from a house to an amusement park.

The broader context also influenced the screenplay. With wars and conflicts intensifying internationally, Rahimjonov found himself thinking increasingly about children whose circumstances deny them experiences that others take for granted.

The result was an eight-minute film about a homeless girl who dreams of entering an amusement park and the security guard whose encounter with her recalls his own childhood.

“The central idea behind Share Happiness is that no child should ever feel like an outsider,” he says. “Regardless of where they live in the world, every child deserves to be happy and to experience a full and meaningful childhood.”

The film explores childhood dreams, inequality and the tension between rules and conscience. Its title, Rahimjonov says, ultimately expresses a simple idea: happiness acquires meaning when it can be shared.

Making the same film twice

The finished film hides how difficult its production was.

Rahimjonov says, quite literally, that the team made Share Happiness twice.

The first production brought together roughly 20 to 25 young people who had completed an animation grant programme. Many were still learning the fundamentals of professional modelling, animation and rendering. Shuhrat Asayev worked as the project’s art director, alongside artists including Elyor Rahmatullayev and Shohsanam Quryozova, layout artist Muhammadyusuf Yo‘ldashev and lead animator Ilhom Karimov.

“We hardly knew how to do anything at a professional level,” Rahimjonov recalls.

But that inexperienced group became the basis of what would develop into Lola Animation’s creative team. Rahmatullayev, for example, is now the studio’s art director.

The first render alone took eight months to arrive.

“When we finally saw it, we were so excited that some of us actually cried,” Rahimjonov says. “We were saying, ‘Are we really making something this amazing?’”

Production continued for around a year and a half. Yet when the rendering process was finally finished, Rahimjonov looked back at what the team had made and concluded that it was no longer good enough.

By then, the animators themselves had improved dramatically. The directing, visual style and technical quality that had once seemed exciting now appeared inadequate beside what the team had learned to produce.

So they discarded the entire eight-minute film.

Rather than patching individual sequences, the team started again from scratch.

It was an expensive decision in time and effort, but for Rahimjonov it also demonstrated how quickly the studio had developed. The final Share Happiness became not simply a film but a record of a team teaching itself how to make professional animation.

Uzbek creators, universal story

Despite being produced in Uzbekistan, Share Happiness was deliberately not designed as an explicitly Uzbek story.

Rahimjonov says the decision was intentional.

“I wanted it to be understandable and relatable to audiences around the world,” he explains. “Whether the viewer is American, Parisian, Russian, African or Uzbek, Muslim or non-Muslim, I wanted everyone to be able to find a feeling or idea that resonates with them.”

Rather than foregrounding traditional motifs or identifiable elements of everyday Uzbek life, the team chose to concentrate on childhood, inequality and compassion.

“I believe that human values transcend national and geographical boundaries,” he says.

For Rahimjonov, however, universality does not mean detachment from Uzbekistan. It reflects his ambition to create from Uzbekistan while participating in conversations that are global rather than geographically confined.

“In a way, the film also reflects my personal perspective as an artist on today’s capitalist world.”

Building an “Uzbek Animation Factory”

Lola Animation describes itself as the “Uzbek Animation Factory.”

The phrase captures the scale of its ambitions. Rahimjonov does not see the studio’s mission simply as producing individual cartoons, but as helping create an animation ecosystem capable of developing talent, telling local stories and competing internationally.

“Our goal is to contribute to building a future where human values come first by creating animated films that are engaging, thought-provoking and promote humanity,” he says.

One of his ambitions is to make Uzbekistan’s own stories more visible internationally.

“There are many stories, struggles, challenges and beautiful values that exist in Uzbekistan,” he says. “I want to bring them to the world through animation.”

At the same time, he resists the idea that Uzbek animation must be culturally self-contained. His aspiration is to connect local experience with themes that viewers elsewhere can recognise.

“I do not see our mission simply as ‘creating Uzbek animation’. To me, it is about connecting the stories, struggles, values and challenges of people in Uzbekistan with universal issues and encouraging audiences around the world to think about them on a global scale.”

That ambition has already produced projects substantially larger than Share Happiness.

Rahimjonov points to Sehrlandiya: A Heroic Mission, developed as a full-length 3D animated film. Work on an early pilot began while Share Happiness was still in production, allowing the same team to apply rapidly developing skills to a more ambitious format.

For Lola Animation, the project became evidence that an Uzbek studio could attempt work on a scale that had previously been unusual in the regional animation industry.

A broken link between generations?

Uzbekistan is not starting from zero.

The country has a long history of animation, but Rahimjonov believes the relationship between earlier generations of artists and those entering the industry today has become fragmented.

Technologically, he says, the two periods are difficult to compare. Digital tools have transformed almost every stage of production, while contemporary animators have access to possibilities that their predecessors could scarcely have imagined.

But technology is not the same as artistic inheritance.

“I feel that, to some extent, the exchange of experience and creative heritage between generations has been interrupted,” Rahimjonov says. “This is not limited to animation; it applies to the arts as a whole.”

The skills, creative approaches and accumulated experience of older Uzbek artists, he believes, were not always successfully transferred to those who followed them.

That makes the current period particularly important. Rahimjonov points to initiatives by the Center for the Development of Children’s Content, the Cinematography Agency and other parts of Uzbekistan’s film sector as potential opportunities to reconnect domestic production with larger international markets.

His ambition is not simply to create technically impressive work, but films capable of surviving beyond the moment in which they were made.

“Just like the masters who came before us, we want to create works that retain their value for many years to come.”

An industry growing quickly

Rahimjonov describes Uzbekistan’s animation sector today as expanding rapidly.

More young people are learning the technical skills required for animation, while private studios and grant programmes are creating opportunities to turn ideas into completed projects.

According to Rahimjonov, where Uzbekistan once had only around three active animation studios, the number is now approaching 15. He also sees the expansion of the country’s IT sector as an important source of skills and infrastructure for animation.

But production remains expensive.

Technically ambitious animation requires significant investment long before audiences see a finished product, and Rahimjonov says finding investors willing to finance complex short films or long-form projects remains difficult.

That is why he repeatedly credits the support of Najot Ta’lim founder Temurbek Adhamov, whose backing helped provide the conditions in which the team behind Share Happiness could learn through experimentation.

The investment was not only in a film. It was also in people who, at the beginning, were still discovering how to build one.

Taking Share Happiness abroad

International festivals now provide Lola Animation with an opportunity to test whether Rahimjonov’s belief in universal storytelling works beyond Uzbekistan.

Share Happiness premiered at the KINOdiseea International Children Film Festival and has also participated in the Black Star International Film Festival and the CMS Lucknow International Children’s Film Festival. It was also screened at the Merveilleux & Imaginaire Film Festival in Paris in September 2026, under the support of the French national committee for UNESCO and with the leadership of Bénédicte Beaugeois.

For Rahimjonov, appearing at a festival in Paris is itself the fulfilment of one of the ambitions that accompanied the film from its earliest stages.

“When we were making the film, we wanted our idea as Uzbek creators to reach the international stage and for audiences and children around the world to see our film,” he says.

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What matters most to him is whether audiences understand the idea at its centre.

“If audiences understand and feel the message we are trying to convey – that every child in the world deserves to be happy – then we will have achieved our goal.”

The film may have been made by an Uzbek team, but the questions it raises – childhood, inequality, dreams, compassion and the invisible barriers created by society – are deliberately broader.

“We live in a world shaped by harsh rules and complicated realities,” Rahimjonov says. “Even so, I believe that humanity and our most beautiful values remain among the most important things we have.”

What comes next

Lola Animation is already working on its next major project.

Yo‘lbars is an animated series centred on road safety, produced by Lola Animation on behalf of Uzbekistan’s Center for the Development of Children’s Content.

Rahimjonov says the underlying motivation is straightforward: preventing children and families from losing their lives in road accidents.

The project includes around 70 characters and, according to Rahimjonov, combines an ambitious visual style with a more complex production and storytelling structure than many of the studio’s earlier projects.

The intention is again international.

“We want children around the world to enjoy watching the series while also becoming more aware of road safety,” he says.

Beyond Yo‘lbars, Lola Animation wants to produce multi-episode series and feature-length animated films across different genres and visual styles. Rahimjonov also wants the studio to expand its grant programmes and share the experience it has accumulated with other emerging Uzbek animation studios.

And after deliberately making Share Happiness culturally universal, he says future feature films may move more explicitly towards Uzbekistan.

“We want to explore authentic Uzbek characters, stories and settings in greater depth and introduce them to audiences around the world.”

For a studio that began with a group of young animators waiting eight months to see their first render, that ambition is considerable.

But Rahimjonov’s own route into the industry was hardly conventional either: from a chance meeting while waiting for a taxi to editing wedding videos, film school in Istanbul and eventually building animated worlds in Tashkent.

The next challenge is to see how far those worlds can travel.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post Share Happiness, build an industry: Lola Animation’s Uzbek animation story appeared first on Novastan English.