India's Expanding Animation Horizons

India's Expanding Animation Horizons
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Another contemporary of Raghunath Goswami, Chandi Lahiri was born in 1929, and started life as a journalist, but later joined Hindus than Standard, an English daily from the now famous Ananda Bazar Group, as staff cartoonist in 1961 after a formal art education. He then went on to serve as staff cartoonist for both the English and Bengali daily Ananda Bazar. Until 1990, he created an immense number of political cartoons which made him famous in India. But he soon became interested in animation and started creating flip books and comic strips. Then Lahiri, totally self-taught, managed to build an animation stand and buy a Pelliard Bolex 16mm camera to make animation films. These include The Biggest Egg, Be A Mouse Again and Under The Blue Moon, which was later bought and telecast by Indian Television. They were of course colour films and in one of them we see an anti-war messege of flowers emerging instead of bullets from a machine gun. However, financial woes forced him to shut down his set-up. But as luck would have it, Juthika Dutta of Calcutta TV took him to Delhi to use the paint box at CPC to create a very interesting film Tinni, the story of a little girl which became very popular.

By broadcasting series like Suddhasattwa Basu's Ghayab Appears, television stations in India have been crucial in increasing awareness of animation in the country. Courtesy of Jayanti Sen. © Doordarshan.

Anjan Ghosh, disciple of Raghunath Goswami, became an extremely accomplished animator himself, and created with Chitra Sarathi the first animation based on Satyajit Ray's famous father Sukumar's nonsense poems Khuror Kol. In 1986 at NID, Anjan completed a two minute film The Green Story based on Leo Lionni's book. He has been working constantly not only as a graphic designer but also creating innumerable storyboards. One of his important later projects with Goswami was an ad-spot for CESC. Then he joined a computer-aided animation workshop on AIDS at Chitrabani, Calcutta led by internationally famous animator Robi Engler. His animation received special mention by Robi in an interview that I completed for the famous Bengali daily Ananda Bazar Patrika. Anjan's background-layout design for my film Hunchback Woman's Tale has earned him universal international acclaim. He later created some TV spots on AIDS for German television.

Gautam Benegal had already made his mark as an animator, creating a music animation, The King Of Burigulla, shot in Calcutta in black-&-white at the studio of Mahendra Kumar, an animation technology enthusiast and close associate of Ritwik Ghatak. Kumar is a famous still photographer and cinematographer. Then Gautam migrated to Bombay to create films for the CFSI such as Tapatop. He then made a number of films for UDC educational projects. Now he is busy working on a film for the government Films Division. He had in between worked as an animator for other non-governmental channels.