Hand-painted works are often wildly unfaithful to the movies they portray – reinterpretations that sometimes resulted in threats, insults and even physical attacks from viewers who felt dupedSitting on his porch in Teshie near Accra, Heavy J dipped a brush into red oil paint and dabbed it carefully on to his canvas – a flour sack – adding blood to a knife being wielded by a man. Higher on the canvas, he had started on an outline of a skull.Heavy J was creating a poster, but not as you might have expected for a horror film.
Instead, it was for the animated fairytale The Little Mermaid. The man with the knife was not a killer but the film’s kind-hearted prince, Eric.
The skull was also unrelated to the story. “We add more to make people interested,” said Heavy J, whose real name is Jeaurs Affutu.
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