India's Expanding Animation Horizons

India's Expanding Animation Horizons
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Dilip Goswami, the other trainee, has turned into a very successful interior designer and is a wonderful animator, animating a pre-designed character to a set sound-track chosen by him at NID, and later making a very interesting film, The Human Dilemma. The story is of a man who tries to take a fresh look at the universe but gets shell-shocked when he discovers the degraded and decayed state of things due to human beings misusing advanced technology and science. He tries to change the situation by eradicating greed or aggression, the root of all evils, with his computer, but fails. This interesting film was never shown and the lack of interested producers has lost an excellent animator in Dilip Goswami.

A powerful scene from Nuzhat Shahzadi and Ram Mohan's Sare, Daughter of the Lioness. Courtesy of Jayanti Sen. © Ram Mohan & Nuzhat Shahzadi.

During my training at NID, I concentrated primarily on cut-out animation as I was inspired by my first cinema guru Satyajit Ray under whom I received my first cinema training during the last 10 years of his life. Later, with my NID training, I created Hunchback Woman's Tale as an independent production for Calcutta TV. Financing was a great problem, but two ex-veterans of Calcutta TV, Bibhas Chakraborty and Abhijit Dasgupta, producer of the first animation ever at Calcutta TV,Chor Palale Buddhi Bare (Intelligence Comes After The Thief Is Done), and animator Samir Chakraborty, helped me with all their resources to make this film possible. But as this film was using cut-out animation, and in 16mm at that, arranging a place to shoot was very hard to find. Finally, Ram Mohan from Bombay came forward and arranged for me to shoot at Cine Magic, introducing me to Suresh S. Naik. He forever has my gratitude. That Hunchback Women's Tale has brought back India's focus to Calcutta owes credit to Ram Mohan and Abhijit Dasgupta as much as the entire film units in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. With a wonderful original score by music director Dipak Chowdhury, this 12 minute cut-out animation features, for the first time in Bengali animation, lip-synchronisation with a full voice track using eminent film and theatre personalities. This film tells the story of a hunchback woman who on her way to her granddaughter's house is threatened by various beasts of prey. Ultimately though, her intelligence saves her life as she is able to fool her enemies. The film went to the Bangladesh Short Film Festival in Dhaka and other places like Hiroshima recieving an excellent response.