VN engine

I though I could waste some time trying to make a visual novel engine on my own. So I'm looking for a OO language that has a decent 2D graphics library.

Tried Squeak yesterday. Slow as fuck and the morphs don't update unless you interact with them.

Any recommendations?

I can tell you from experience, a VN engine is one of the least interesting projects you can possibly undertake. Once you've written the text printing mechanism (word wrapping and all that crap), the rest is just boring shit.

God help you if you try to duplicate an existing engine, most likely Japanese. You'll have to deal with such shit as Shift JIS encoding because the Japanese live in the 80s and don't know Unicode exists now.
If that wasn't enough, Japanese programmers of all sorts are terrible. Prepare to duplicate logic errors that contradict existing documentation (assuming you can find any).

C++ + SDL