Russian animation producer and Toonbox co-founder Pavel Muntyan said in an interview with Novaya-Europe that he was reflecting on 16 years of the Mr. Freeman project, the virtual state Freeland, and his views on the future of artificial intelligence.
Muntyan said the series was never conceived as a commercial product and was not meant to move beyond animation. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, he left Moscow for Cyprus. After the full-scale war began, he publicly opposed the invasion and set up a fund to help Ukraine. In Russia, he was labeled a “foreign agent” and sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison under the law on “fake news about the army.”
“The Russian authorities dislike and fear anyone who has a large audience and has not submitted to them. And Mr. Freeman is about freedom,” Muntyan said.
He also recalled that in 2017 he announced Freeland as an extraterritorial state existing in the information space. According to him, the Freeland passport follows international standards and has been used in a social experiment: holders rented cars, checked into hotels and, he said, crossed borders within Europe and Asia.
The producer also spoke about the future of technology. He believes mobile apps will gradually be replaced by AI sub-agents, followed by the arrival of AGI and then superintelligence. In his view, the growing role of AI in governance could eventually produce a strict but effective digital system capable of restraining violence and political arbitrariness.