Mahnaz Yazdani

Mahnaz Yazdani is a cartoonist, animator, and screenplay writer living in Iran.

Interview

 * I like to tell my thoughts in a funny way and as short as possible


 * I was born 40 years ago in Isfahan, Iran. My childhood is not my life's favourite part. I was impatient to grow and get old enough to be able to control my own life. However, that period gave me a deep knowledge of how pain, sorrow, fear and inequality feel like. It gave me sharp eyes to identify them and be empathetic with people who experience those feelings. This is the main power of my art process. As a child, I felt deep love for animals, and I have been having many pets ever since. I loved watching cartoons and painting, and I wanted to be a big painter like Leonardo da Vinci; but I had not the chance to attend any art course until I was 18 years. I have never stopped making art after that. I married when I was 21 years with an animator, and he has helped me a lot in my art career during those years.


 * In my early childhood, I liked to draw but my love for it decreased when I went to school. Our art teachers asked us to draw from a picture and never cared about our own thoughts and imaginations to be drawn. I liked drawing but not what I was asked to draw. When I was 18 years old, I attended an Iranian painting (miniature) course, but there I was not allowed to draw my thoughts too. So, I dropped from that course and attended a cartoon course; and then it was exactly what I was looking for. It was all about drawing your thoughts and feelings, and I had lots of thoughts to draw. While I was trying to learn drawing cartoons, I attended an animation course too and I found it so amazing. Those were the best art forms for me to share what I was feeling Then I became an animator and cartoonist.


 * (My cartoons) convey a short, unique and humorous message. It is what I like to do. I spend lots of time in the first step of the creative process to find such an idea, then I write it as a short story. Only after that I decide which art form - cartoon, comic or animation - can express that story in the best way. The right choice can increase its chance to become viral. A short humorous content has more chance to be shared on social medias and thus reach and impact more people too.


 * I want to mention artists who inspired me so much like cartoonist Quino and Yuriy kuzubukin, Pete Docter's ideas and animations, the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Charlie Chaplin's comedies. Their art talk about human deep feelings. mostly their pains and sorrows, social inequalities, what is life and how loneliness feels, loving nature and other creatures. These are the main foundational concepts of most of my artworks too.