CARISA LEE

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

Be­ing sur­round­ed by strong women his en­tire life is one of the main rea­sons why Ever­ard McBain, the cre­ator of Jumbie, de­cid­ed to make the char­ac­ter a woman.

“My mom.... who a sto­ry I like to tell.... she was the one who first gave me my art sup­plies that caused me to start cre­at­ing, my sis­ter who did sev­er­al things to as­sist me cre­ative­ly grow­ing up and now to­day my wife, who is my rock and sup­port and the cre­ator of Jumbie,” McBain said.

He told Guardian Me­dia that 2020 was a dif­fi­cult year for cit­i­zens be­cause of the pan­dem­ic and as many lost their jobs and were vic­tims of crime.

“I thought to my­self that peo­ple would need some­thing to in­spire them to en­cour­age them to build back or to re­cov­er… and what bet­ter place to find in­spi­ra­tion and mo­ti­va­tion than in our own cul­ture, “he said.

And while Jumbie was not di­rect­ly cre­at­ed be­cause of the 47 women killed or abused in 2020 and the oth­ers this year, McBain said it was launched at the per­fect time.

“She’s a young woman not un­like any oth­er young woman in T&T who through an un­for­tu­nate set of cir­cum­stances was cursed with the pow­er of the Jumbie and rather than feel bad about it she choos­es to use her mis­for­tune to right the wrongs and fight the evils that she sees in her so­ci­ety,” he ex­plained.

In the Caribbean, a Jumbie is seen as a bad spir­it of de­mon but in this an­i­ma­tion she is the op­po­site. McBain said that was be­cause he need­ed a char­ac­ter syn­ony­mous with our cul­ture.

“I tell peo­ple the stan­dard su­per­hero would not have a good time in Trinidad, Su­per­man would not last a day,” he joked.

Three sea­sons, 12 episodes each of Jumbie’s sto­ry­line have al­ready been cre­at­ed and McBain said he was in talks with po­ten­tial spon­sors.

The trail­er was post­ed to twit­ter on Feb­ru­ary 15 and since then it has gone vi­ral with over 200,000 views.

“When is this com­ing to Net­flix,” one twit­ter user asked.

“Pro­duce this and take my mon­ey,” an­oth­er said.

McBain said it has been shared re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and thanked Tri­ni twit­ter for blow­ing the trail­er up.

Many de­scribed the an­i­ma­tion to in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard but Jumbie was ac­tu­al­ly cre­at­ed by a hus­band and wife duo. McBain said it was a project he al­ways want­ed to start and he thought him­self how to an­i­mate. His wife, who usu­al­ly co-writes, al­so did the 3D mod­el­ling.

Their an­i­ma­tion com­pa­ny is GemGfx.