The young people of Kathmandu are catching up with global changes and have started embracing these new changes. But something that has managed to affect even the youngster of today is a 2D cartoon of a village girl and her talking parrot, Meena and Mithu.[break]
Conceived in the 1992, Meena is a spirited girl in a small non-descriptive village with traditional values and beliefs. Meena, through various adventures with her parrot, Mithu, her brother Raju, and their friends finds flaws in the uneducated society as she attempts to educate the people around her.
The Meena cartoons advocated social change and cultural flaws in an uneducated society such as rural villages in South Asia. With characters these village girls could relate to in environments much like their own, Meena has been highly successful in reaching out to young viewers.
UNICEF, the organization behind the successful cartoon, spent more than a year researching storylines of incapacitating issues faced by the young girls from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
The series confronted the extreme prejudices faced by young girls in these regions.
“When we first started Meena, there were a lot of problems that girl children were facing due to socio cultural stigmas. Multimedia was a new and exciting form of medium for these children then, but it was quite expensive as well,” says Sharad Ranjit, Chief of Communications of Development at the UN House.
“We launched Meena in a very large scale, raging from comics to posters to advertisements in children’s magazines, all with the common social message of uplifting girl children,” he informs.
Meena was an iconic cartoon that taught more to the young girls of Nepal’s villages than traditional forms of education. One of Meena’s very famous adventures include her thirst for education but restricted by social stigma that girls aren’t meant to go to school, she is deprived.
Her parrot, Mithu, however, memorizes lessons from her brother’s classes and teaches them to her, and when Meena figures out that someone has been cheating her family out of their chickens, with her newfound knowledge, her father decides to send her to attend school.
Meena has tackled many social issues like the dowry system, food discrimination on the basis of gender, or cures of preventable diseases.
“Through the animated characters, children recognize their own experiences and find their own voices. As a little girl in a Dhaka slum exclaimed, ‘I want to be like Meena. I want to go to school too,’” reports the Animation World Network website.
Through Meena’s stories, little girls have been able to articulate and identify with their aspirations and rights. Likewise, parents have also started getting engaged with issues relating their daughters and reviewing their own attitudes towards them.
The influence of Meena was not restricted to the villages, either. Urban youth also watched and loved these cartoons. As an iconic South Asian blend to the cartoon, many youngsters from many parts of urban cities did relate to Meena and her adventures as well.
This helped educate young children from all the different economic strata, educating and bringing the issues faced by rural developing parts of the country to the more educated youth as well.
“I loved watching Meena. It would always be very interesting mainly because of how closely we could relate to her and the characters in the cartoon,” says Sayog Adhikari, 20, currently studying at Nepal College of Travel and Tourism Management (NCTTM), Naxal.
“An interesting fact is that I was so influenced by Meena that I started keeping a parrot as a pet. It was a very influential cartoon that taught us a lot. I definitely would want to see its comeback,” he adds.
The sad side to the story is that Meena is no longer broadcast. After 13 episodes of successful broadcasts in eight different languages, the project is still alive with newer episodes being made but Nepal seems to have developed out of its reach.
“We got very good feedback for Meena and did succeed in making the kind of change we had hoped for. Village people, after watching an episode of Meena, would be more receptive to change, promising better treatment of their daughter. The society has developed now and more and more young girls are attending school, and their status has improved. I’m not saying that Meena is no longer relevant but that development is already taking place. Also because the fund allocated for Meena have dried up, it’s quite difficult to bring her back, although other independent I/NGOs have been using her,” adds Ranjit.
Nepal requires projects like these to provide informal education to children in rural areas. But there haven’t been any other projects like Meena that work on social changes.
In fact, there haven’t been any locally made animations or cartoons for Nepali children in recent years. Nepal maybe developing, children maybe getter smarter, but there will always be a need for informal ways of learning, and local projects and local animators should work on bringing cartoons like “Meena and Mithu” back on the silver screen.
“We’ve been brainstorming on another project that embodies a teenage girl who attempts to educate young girls about sexual health but still much is left to be done,” says Ranjit.
(Old episodes of Meena are still available on YouTube, and the characters are kept alive through episodes of online comics that are available on UNICEF’s website.)
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