Paritosh Singh - Animating Indianness: a Study of Assimilating Indian Images in a Western Narrative
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Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 Paritosh Singh - Animating Indianness: A study of assimilating Indian images in a western narrative Date : 17-06-2018 1 Introduction Stories have always been an integral part of every society and culture. Storytelling is the most common means of sharing experiences. It majorly influences various aspects of our life and plays a vital role in defining our values, desires and dreams. Stories can be considered as universal since they bridge the gaps between different cultures, languages and ages (Atta-Alla 2012). They also provide a tool for transferring knowledge in social context and can be used as a method to teach ethics, values and cultural norms (Davidson, 2004). In this continuously evolving process, animation is emerging as a very powerful tool for storytelling with immense scope of further exploration. Although it appears to be full of technology, its basic principles can be traced back to the primitive human era. From those times, attempts to capture the motion drawing or animation can be found in various cave paintings like Bhimbetka in India, where animals are depicted in superimposed positions with multiple legs, trying to convey the perception of motion. Similarly, from centuries, puppets are being used for entertainment and to communicate various ideas and needs of human societies. If we look at the Indian history, tribal arts provide various examples of animation like in Warli tribal art characters are shown in different walking cycles to depict the motion of dancing, etc. The styles and characteristics of scroll paintings of Patua resemble storyboards where drawings are made in a series and they are very favourable to be animated (Indianimation.com, 2017b). 2 Animation in India The credit of exploring the animation in India goes to the father of Indian cinema, Dhundiraj Govind “Dadasaheb” Phalke. He tried his first animation attempt The Growth of Pea Plant using stop motion in 1912. But it was never released. Later in 1915, he released Agkadyanchi Mouj (Matchsticks’ Fun) which is known as the first animated film in India. Later on, he created more animation films like Laxmicha Galicha and Vichitra Shilpa. He inspired lots of people with his work and others also started involving in the animation film making. In 1934, the first animated movie The Pea Brothers directed by Gunamoy Banerjee, released in the theatres. Also in the same year the first animated film with a soundtrack, On a Moonlight Night was produced. It’s credited to composer and orchestra leader R.C. Boral. This new technique of film making started becoming popular and few other films were released in the coming years like Lafanga Langoor (1935), produced by Mohan Bhavani, Superman Myth (1939), directed by G.K. Gokhale and produced by Indian Cartoon Pictures, and Cinema Kadampam (1947), supervised by N. Thanu. During this time even the most famous Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray started an experiment on rough visual presentation of film which is now called as story-boarding. He also developed some rough techniques of stop-motion animation by moving and capturing matchbox sticks frame by frame (Indianimation.com, 2017a). Later on, Indian animation witnessed a series of turning points, which became the crucial trigger in defining the current state of Animation Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 animation industry in India. 2.1 Clair Weeks and The Banyan Deer During the time of India’s independence, although united in freedom, the country was divided by language, religion and caste across a huge landmass. In that era, animation was seen as a medium of great potential which can reach out to the citizens to tackle the issues like population control, voting rights, women’s empowerment, cleanliness, literacy, education, etc. A special Cartoon Unit for animation was established at the Films Division in 1945. Through the UNESCO and the U.S. Technical Aid Program an ex-Disney animator Clair Weeks was brought to the Films Division in 1956 to train a group of animators. Clair Weeks was born in India as the son of a Methodist missionary. He spent 16 years at the Disney Studios, working on famous animation films like Snow White, Bambi and Peter Pan. The people trained by him, including the famous Ram Mohan, Bhimsain, and the late Kantilal Rathod, contributed a lot to the animation industry in India (AnimationResources.org, 2017). The first film that came out of this first breed of animators trained by Clair weeks was The Banyan Deer. Its story was a Buddhist Jataka tale. The Jatakas are popular stories that make the Buddha’s teaching more accessible to the common man. This story was chosen since its roots lies in India and the visual inspiration can be taken from the popular cave paintings at Ajanta. The Ajanta caves contain detailed and amazingly beautiful pictorial representations of the life of the Buddha and all of the Jatakas. In the tale of The Banyan Deer, the Buddha takes an avatar of a noble deer. Initially, it was decided to use the beautiful and peculiar animal figure representations available in the paintings at Ajanta while designing the character of The Banyan Deer. When Clair Weeks came to India, he brought a lot of material from his previous Disney films. It also includes the model sheets from the well-known film Bambi whose protagonist is also a deer. Clair helped a lot in teaching the Indian animators about the area of character design, storyboarding and the rules of classical animation. The model sheets from Bambi are used extensively to instruct for the same. The greatest challenge that appeared in front of the Indian animators was to adapt the imagery of Ajanta paintings with the rules of classical animation. When the production of this film completed, it gained huge popularity in the media and among the audience. Clair Weeks successfully completed the task to establish an animation team, which is able to handle the production on its own for the many more films to come. But if this film is analysed from the point of view of whether it was able to define the Indian animation style of its own, then it completely failed in doing so. Even the father of Indian animation, Ram Mohan quoted, “The Banyan Deer was supposed to be the representation of the Bodhisattva and instead ended up being the avatar of Bambi (Ranade, 2009).” This animation film just ended up being another western animation work in the Disney style made by the Indian animators. Even the main character of the film looks more influenced from Bambi as compared to the Ajanta paintings. This can be considered as the crucial point in the history of Indian animation, which hugely affected the mindset of coming generations of Indian animators. From that point onwards, people blindly started following the western styles and hardly tried to create the style of its own which can be called Indian. 2.2 Ramayan: The Legend of Prince Rama In 90s, the TV serials based on Hindu mythology used to be very popular among the Indian household. At the same time, Ram Mohan along with the Japanese filmmaker Yugo Animation Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 Sako directed Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama. Released in 1992, this Indo- Japanese traditional animation feature film is based on the Indian epic the Ramayana. During the starting of production, Ramayana being a very sensitive subject didn’t get the permission to be animated by the Government of India. So Yugo Sako decided to do it as a complete Japanese production under the co-direction and supervision of Ram Mohan. Even though they faced resistance from Indian government, the film was well accepted abroad. It was screened as the opening film of the 2000 Lucca Animation Film Festival in Italy and won the Best Animation Film of the Year at the 2000 Santa Clarita International Film Festival in the United States (Dsource.in, 2017). The film wasn’t distributed properly in theatres in India initially but the DVD version helped popularise it. Also, it was only after Cartoon Network screened it that it caught on (Telegraphindia.com, 2017). The visual treatment of this film fascinated the Indian audience, since it’s something new for them at that time. The complete animation of this film is done by the Japanese animators. They worked very hard to incorporate the Indian looks, clothing and gestures in the film. But as Ram Mohan himself noted, it is neither a Japanese Ramayana nor an Indian Ramayana. It is a sort of general Ramayana targeted for the global audience. With reference to the characters in Japanese anime style, Lord Ram is also portrayed with muscular and well- toned body. But in the Indian paintings, he is always illustrated with the body similar to the common man. Similarly, the body proportion for other characters like Sita, Laxman, etc is also exaggerated to match the ideal human proportion. One of the distinguishing features of the Japanese anime is the structure of the eyes. The same eye format is used in this version of Ramayana as well, whereas the structure of eyes in Indian paintings is often long and sharp. Even though this film was not able to establish an Indian visual style, but it was able to show the great potential of Indian mythology as the subject for animation.