Persian animation turns to Shahnameh and children's books as producers court a regional audience

Iran's animation industry is having a quiet argument with itself, and it is being conducted in the language of children's books. On 26 June 2026, Iran's Mehr News Agency published an interview with Mohammad Mahdi Mashkuri, an animation producer, in which he made a case that the country's strongest pipeline of screen stories remains its own literary inheritance — from the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's tenth-century epic, to contemporary children's fiction that, in his telling, is too rarely mined for adaptation.

The argument matters because the global market for animated storytelling has consolidated around a small number of export-oriented studios, most of them American or East Asian, leaving producers in Iran, Turkey and the broader Middle East competing for screens they do not control. Mashkuri's pitch is that the stories most worth telling are the ones the international pipeline has structural reasons to ignore.

Why children's literature, and why now

Mashkuri's case, as Mehr News reported it, rests on a simple claim: there is more usable narrative in a single volume of well-written Iranian children's fiction than in most of the screenplays currently being commissioned. Children's literature, he argues, already does the work a screenwriter would otherwise have to do — it establishes a moral register, a young protagonist a child viewer can inhabit, and a world small enough to render on a modest budget. Studios that skip the literature step spend years reinventing it.

The pitch also has a market logic. Animated features aimed at children travel across linguistic borders more easily than live-action drama; dialogue is sparse, visual grammar does most of the work, and parents will sit through anything their six-year-old demands. A studio in Tehran that adapts a Persian children's book is not, in the first instance, exporting a national brand — it is exporting a runtime.

The Shahnameh as source code

The harder case is the classical one. The Shahnameh is a 50,000-couplet poem, written between roughly 977 and 1010 CE, that narrates the mythical and historical past of the Iranian plateau from creation to the Arab conquest. Its episodes — the grief of Rostam, the tragedy of Sohrab, the seven trials of Kay Kavus — are already structured as screen drama. Characters have iconic silhouettes. Stakes are pitched at the cosmic register animation handles best.

Mashkuri's argument is not that the Shahnameh needs to be preserved. It has been preserved for a millennium. The argument is that it has not yet been fully exploited as raw material — that the gap between how much Persian-speaking audiences already know these stories and how little that knowledge has been converted into screen product is, in itself, an opportunity. Animation, with its tolerance for stylised violence, its indifference to the need for live actors, and its appetite for the kind of stylised naturalism a Rostam-and-Sohrab duel requires, is the format the epic has been waiting for.

The structural obstacle

The obstacle is not, in the first instance, creative. It is industrial. Iran's animation sector operates inside the same sanctions architecture that constrains the rest of its cinema — limits on payment rails, on co-production treaties with European partners, on access to the rendering software and render-farm capacity that contemporary feature animation assumes. Studios that want to make a feature at international standard have to route their financing and their post-production through third countries, and every additional hop costs both money and creative control.

The result is a sector that produces short-form and television work consistently, and feature work sporadically. Mashkuri's interview with Mehr News does not minimise this. He frames children's literature as a workaround precisely because the literature is already shaped to the budget: a 30-page illustrated book is a 75-minute screenplay with the heavy lifting done, and the format does not require the rendering capacity a fully computer-generated feature demands.

What is at stake

The cultural stakes are easier to name than the commercial ones. A generation of Iranian children growing up with Rostam rendered by a Tehran studio, rather than encountering the Shahnameh only as a school text, would inherit a different relationship to the epic than their parents did. So would the diaspora — the several-million-strong Persian-speaking audience in Los Angeles, Toronto, Stockholm and the Gulf cities, which already consumes Persian-language children's content at volume and which currently has to choose between heritage material and whatever the global platforms push.

The commercial stakes are more contingent. The international animation market is not short of supply. It is short of stories that feel as though they come from somewhere, and it is short of distribution into the Middle East and South Asian markets that Western studios have historically undersold. An Iranian studio that cracked the children's-book adaptation model would not so much compete with Hollywood as occupy a territory Hollywood has decided not to walk into.

What remains uncertain

Mehr News's interview presents the case as Mashkuri makes it; it does not, in the version circulated on 26 June 2026, name specific forthcoming projects, announce release dates, or disclose studio partners. Whether the argument translates into a slate of greenlit features — or, as has happened before in Iranian animation, remains a programme of intent — will depend on financing structures that the interview does not address. The conversation is also, by Mashkuri's own framing, an argument about the future of Iranian cinema rather than a report on its present; readers should treat the children's-book pipeline as a direction of travel rather than a confirmed release schedule.

Desk note: This article frames the Mashkuri interview through the lens of industrial capacity and storytelling inheritance, rather than treating it as a cultural-nationalist pitch. The Mehr News source is presented as a producer's argument rather than as documentary evidence of an imminent pipeline.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/mehrnews