ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.02 - MAY 2000

India's Expanding Horizons
(continued from page 2)

Animation Studios - Big And Small
India boasts many animation studios -- big and small. In Bombay, in addition to Mohan’s RM-USL, which has bagged several foreign animation orders including Disney Television’s 101 Dalmatians, studios are doing important work. These include Crest Communications, CMM Studios and Silver Toons in Bombay, plus some other small studios run by animators who learnt their craft at Ram Mohan Biographics. Thus Ram Mohan has played a big role in creating a majority of the young animators who are now operating as smaller studios. Outside of Bombay we have in Madras Pentafour, Motion Graphics and Zica. Zica is also a training institute producing student films like The Lift, which won the best animation award at the International Children's Film Festival in Hyderabad.

Disney has sent some of their production to India like the TV series 101 Dalmatians. © Disney. All Rights Reserved.

When we look at the current state of Indian animation where the studios are concerned we have every reason to feel happy. Another important animation centre is blossoming in Hyderabad where Heart Animation is a training institute cum supplier of foreign animation studio orders. The studio is working on many assignments from outside of India. Crest Communications is right now working on an 80-minute animation feature co-produced with Hollywood's Rich Animation. Another live-action/animation feature film is going to start soon at Crest Communications. They are working on a virtual reality project for a film for Belgium’s Vertek. Another studio operating in Delhi called Span India Communications is also working on virtual reality projects and caters mostly to the overseas market. Unfortunately, Pictoreel Facet and Gimmicks in Bombay are now closed down, but Bhimsain’s Climb Films, his son Kireet Khurana’s 2NZ Studios and the oldest studio in Bombay Suresh Naik's Cine Magic are working double-time supplying title animations, special effects and opticals for the feature film industry and, of course, commercials. All of these studios thrive on commercials. Naturally, these aren’t all of the companies in India, but we can say that at least in Bombay, Madras and Hyderabad a robust animation industry has grown up. Only the Eastern Region, with its infantile animation, is still reeling from a lack of funding, proper animation awareness and training facilities. Still the present generation of animators is trying to fill this vacuum and only the future can say what can and can’t be achieved. Let us hope for the best.

Indian Animation Becomes Commercial -- The Animation Ad Comes Alive
We saw earlier that at the very beginning, animators like Mandar Mullick had the vision to realize animation’s potential as a very strong weapon in the advertising field. Maybe his own contact and correspondence with Walt Disney, which our now world famous painter Ganesh Pyne, an animator then, saw in Mullick’s studio, helped him to develop the idea. However the animation ad industry really flourished in the hands of Ram Mohan and Bhimsain. In the early Sixties we saw a massive boom in the ad industry as a whole, especially in Bombay, or Mumbai as it is now called. India's growth in the industrial sector with more and more multi-national companies like Coca-Cola spreading their wings had a direct effect on the growth of the animation advertisement industry.

But even in the initial stages, the animation ad was playing a different game altogether when compared to its counterpart the mainstream animated film. To maintain the extreme commercial smartness of ads in general, they are given a huge budget. As Ram Mohan stated to me, the ad industry gives huge budgets to commercials in order to maintain the high standard of sale ability and reach a massive audience.

Bhimsain’s The Fire. Courtesy of Jayanti Sen. © Bhimsain.

To achieve this high standard, the animation studios and individual animators must work very hard and it is through these commercials that the real capability of the animator is realized. Here they finally get enough funding to create the kind of film they want to make. Even within the constraint of just 20 seconds, creativity faces a challenge, which must be met as today most animators depend on ads to provide their main source of support. In the Sixties, Ram Mohan was making a lot of these ad spots, and so was Bhimsain. One especially remembers an ad for a refrigerator, where a penguin with all of its Arctic associations was very intelligently used. The result was highly innovative and interesting. As the sport of cricket gained an all-encompassing popularity, a certain brand of pencil used not only in cricket but also in cel animation in its promotions. Another kind of animation, which is normally never used in mainstream animation, is product animation. However, ad spot makers just lapped it up to promote brand-products like biscuits, soap, detergents -- all brought to life using computer-aided 2D or 3D animation.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.

Table of Contents
Feedback?
Past Issues

Animation World Magazine
Career Connections | School Database | Student Corner
Animation World Store | Animation Village | Calendar of Events
The AWN Gallery | The AWN Vault | Forums & Chats
Home

About | Help | Home | info@awn.com | Mail | Register

©2000 Animation World Network