Camel, Remal Festival Kuwait
The Camel Was the Star of the Festival. Here's How We Built It.
Commission: Aldour Events / Remal International Festival, Kuwait | Prince Amir & the Camel | Large-Scale Animatronic Walkabout Character
The Brief
The Remal International Festival is one of Kuwait's most significant annual cultural celebrations — a major public event celebrating A Thousand and One Nights, drawing broad international audiences to the heart of one of the Arabian Gulf's most culturally rich nations.
Aldour Events needed a large-scale walkabout spectacle that would celebrate the camel as Kuwait's national animal — an animal of profound cultural, historical and economic significance to the host nation and its people — while connecting the festival's international audiences to the magic of the Arabian Nights. The character needed to work simultaneously as a cultural tribute and as popular entertainment: accessible and warm and funny for visitors of every background, whilst carrying genuine respect for the culture it was representing.
Prince Amir and the Camel was the response.
The Concept
Prince Amir is a Meerkat of spectacularly inflated self-importance, perched atop a large and magnificently unimpressed camel. He is the storyteller — the connective thread between the festival's international audiences and the world of the Arabian Nights. His take on the ancient tales is distinctive, personal, and delivered with the absolute conviction of someone who believes, without question, that his role in those tales has been both central and criminally underacknowledged.
The camel — Kitty — is the dignity to his indignity. The size to his smallness. The patience to his chaos.
Together they are a walkabout act that operates simultaneously at two registers: large-scale visual spectacle for the crowds, and intimate comedic encounter for the individuals who come close. The camel's scale commands the festival site. Prince Amir's voice — delivered via onboard sound system and microphone — fills it. The combination creates the kind of presence that stops a crowd and holds it, three times daily, for seven weeks.
The Cultural Dimension
The camel is not simply a comic device in this act. It is Kuwait's national animal — an animal whose relationship with the Bedouin people of the Arabian Peninsula shaped an entire civilisation, whose endurance across desert conditions made trade, pilgrimage and communication possible across a landscape that would otherwise have been impassable, and whose image appears on the Kuwaiti coat of arms.
Building a character that honours that significance — that celebrates the camel as a genuine cultural emblem rather than an exotic prop — required a level of cultural engagement that went beyond the technical brief. The design, the character dynamic, the storytelling context, the way Prince Amir talks about the camel and about the Arabian Nights: all of it was developed with the host culture's values and pride in mind.
The client's response — "the camel was the star of the festival" — is the clearest possible confirmation that the balance was right.
The Build
The camel was built to perform three times daily for seven weeks in Kuwait's Gulf climate — a standard that shapes every engineering decision from the first sketch. Multi-directional head, moving mouth, onboard sound system with microphone: the same specification as the Jin characters built for the same festival, applied here to a character of completely different scale, aesthetic and performance register.
Where the Jin were slow, silent and mythologically weighty, Prince Amir and the Camel were fast, vocal and comedically alive. The engineering had to serve that difference: a rig built for sustained dynamic performance, for the quick reactions and broad physical comedy of a walkabout act, rather than the slow processional movement of the Nomadica giants.
Both sets of characters performed without malfunction across the full seven-week residency. In the Gulf heat. Three times daily.
The Specifications
Large-scale animatronic walkabout character. Multi-directional head. Moving mouth. Onboard sound system with microphone. Built for daily performance in Gulf climate conditions over seven weeks.
Build time: Seven weeks.
The Result
"The camel was the star of the festival!"
- Yousef Aldour, Aldour Events
Five words. From a client who also commissioned and deployed the Jin — two giant smoke-breathing animatronic characters of extraordinary complexity and scale. The camel was the star. That is the sentence we are most proud of.
Prince Amir & the Camel as a Bookable Act
The character that starred at the Remal International Festival is also available to book as a walkabout act for your event. Prince Amir and Kitty the Camel perform at festivals, corporate events, Arabian Nights occasions, shopping centre activations and beyond — bringing the same large-scale spectacle and intimate comedic encounter that captivated Kuwait to events across the UK and internationally.
To book the act, visit the Prince Amir & Kitty the Camel performance page.
To commission a bespoke large-scale animatronic walkabout character of your own, read on.
Thinking About Something Similar?
If you are planning a large-scale cultural event, international festival or brand activation that requires a bespoke animatronic walkabout character — one built to carry cultural significance as well as entertainment value, and to perform reliably in demanding conditions over an extended run — we would love to talk.
We have extensive experience building large-scale walkabout characters for international cultural events, with a deep understanding of how to balance spectacle and intimacy, cultural respect and popular entertainment, artistic ambition and operational reliability.
To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.
Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke animatronic characters and full-service performance residencies across the UK and internationally, for clients including Aldour Events / Remal International Festival Kuwait, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, and Lakeside Arts Nottingham.
