Animation in South Asia could be eyeing a game-changing leap led by filmmakers working in partnership with international producers, film festivals and funding agencies. A film premiering at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, a couple of debut projects in development and a proposed web series helmed by a veteran, among others, represent an exciting range of new ventures with a global outlook. These films represent a clean break from children’s cartoons and mythological yarns.
A key reason for filmmakers increasingly looking for backers abroad is the reluctance of domestic producers to fund animation features. “Our animators have been ready for many years, but there just was no funding available,” says Mumbai producer-director Soumitra Ranade. “I read many animation scripts when young directors approach me for my suggestions. It breaks my heart to ask them: who is funding this?” Happily, at least three young men — four, if we count Karachi’s Usman Riaz, whose debut feature, The Glassworker, is slated for release this year — have found a way out.
Producer-director Soumitra Ranade
One of them is Baroda-based Ishan Shukla, whose first feature Schirkoa is premiering at Rotterdam on January 28. Produced by the director with Bich-Quân Tran (France’s Dissidenz Films), Stephan Holl (Germany’s Rapid Eye Movies) and India’s Samir Sarkar, the film is set in a near-perfect city where citizens cover their heads with paper bags to dissolve differences. Tensions rise when whispers of a mythical land without the bags start to float and a fresh council member sparks an accidental revolution.
How have international producers impacted the project? “Bich-Quân pushed the film further in terms of ambition and scale,” says Shukla. “She understood that we were creating cinema, not just animation.” She brought Golshifteh Farahani, Gaspar Noe, Soko and the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz into the voice cast. “She also set up the motion capture shoot in Angouleme [from where a large percentage of France’s animation production emerges],” he adds.
A still from Schirkoa
Shukla, who honed his animation skills in Singapore, made a 14-minute short, Schirkoa, in 2016, on his return to India. It went to numerous festivals and sold to channels across the globe besides being longlisted for the Academy Awards. “I made a bit of money and realised that such projects could be pitched internationally,” he says. While he has five to six people in his core technical team, he also works with talent from across the world. “My character designer is from China, my storyboard artist from Iran and my sound designer from France.”
Mentorship and direction
Kolkata animator Upamanyu Bhattacharyya, too, has gone international for his feature debut, Heirloom. “I’d never have conceived the project had it not been for the Annecy Festival Residency’s call for applications,” says the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad alumnus. The residency helped him think global. He also worked closely for many years with Spanish animation director Isabel Herguera on Sultana’s Dream, which premiered at the 71st San Sebastian Film Festival last September.
Upamanyu Bhattacharyya
“I would not be attempting a feature of my own without that experience,” says Bhattacharyya, whose association with Annecy began in 2020, the year his 10-minute animated short, Wade, premiered at the festival and won the City of Annecy Award. “Herguera’s artistic vision and her determination to stick to a project like this for so many years are my main inspiration,” he says. “At Annecy, developing the film was all I had to worry about. We had script and artistic mentorship.”
A still from Wade
Heirloom, set in 1960s Ahmedabad, is a fantasy family story about a couple engaged in the textiles industry. A man is intent on creating a handloom museum. But his wife, with an eye on financial stability, wants to enter the power loom business.
Among Bhattacharyya’s mentors was Reza Riahi, the Paris-based Iranian animation filmmaker who was the art director of Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner, French-Irish animator Adrien Merigeau, and Elea Gobbe-Mevellec, director of The Swallows of Kabul (2019). “It was great to have such experienced directors to bounce ideas off,” he says. Because when he first got into animation, there wasn’t a lot of information available to him — “about where I could go for funding, what residencies and grants I could apply for, which festivals have markets and they worked. It took a long time to learn. If people had that information as a ready resource, I feel they would be able to make better decisions. It should be open source and that’s something we hope to do after Heirloom releases in 2026.”
Heirloom
“Animation is time consuming. Right now, it’s a closed loop where we don’t have a precedent of a successful feature. Hopefully, that will happen now [with the new crop of films], and the more it happens the easier it will become for the next lot of projects and directors. To have a diversity of voices, you need to have a large number of people making their short films in the next five years, so that they can graduate to a good batch of features in the next 10 years.”Upamanyu Bhattacharyya
Across the border
Also nearing release (this April, to coincide with Eid) is Pakistan’s first-ever hand-drawn 2D animation film, The Glassworker. Directed by Karachi animator Usman Riaz, the 92-minute Ghibli-style film has India’s Apoorva Bakshi (Emmy Award-winning producer of Netflix’s Delhi Crime and The Hunt for Veerappan) on board as executive producer.
Animator Usman Riaz
The Glassworker is about a father-son duo who runs Pakistan’s finest glass workshop. An impending war throws them off gear. The arrival in town of an army colonel and his daughter, an aspiring violinist, alters the relationship between father and son. Produced by Riaz’s Mano Animation Studios, Spanish animation film producer Manuel Cristobal (Bunuel in the Labyrinth of Turtles, 2019) is also on board and Paris-based sales agency Charades has picked up the international rights.
The Glassworker
Ranade,meanwhile, is developing Itch, a 10-part animated web show set in 10 megacities of the world. Proposed to be delivered as two seasons of five 22-minute episodes each, it “is about what the city does to an individual”, says the producer who also backed Gitanjali Rao’s critically-acclaimed Bombay Rose.
Animated web show Itch
The first season deals with five individuals in five different cities. “Each of the 10 episodes will have a different style to represent the city, the culture, and the nature of the story itself,” Ranade reveals. “The stories deal with traffic jams and on-the-brink relationships, pollution and housing loans, loneliness and social media, sexual desires and violence.” Itch is meant for adults, as are Schirkoa, Heirloom and another evolving Indian animated feature, Abhinandan Banerjee’s sophomore venture, Just Another Billboard.
Striking out on his own
Kolkata-based filmmaker and graphic designer Abhinandan Banerjee, too, is striving for cultural fidelity in his Bengali-English-German feature, Just Another Billboard, a supernatural-horror period story set in WW2 Calcutta. “It has been in development for a year and a half now,” he reveals. “I was waiting to understand animation in the context of international cinema before taking the plunge.” Banerjee, whose live-action feature Manikbabur Megh (The Man & the Cloud, 2021), premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, hopes to have his self-produced Just Another Billboard ready by Christmas 2025. “Devising the diverse animation styles for the different periods and settings of the film is taking time,” he says.
Technology matters
Signing with international producers has also meant access to the latest technology. Traditionally, animation filmmakers only have rough storyboards or a grey viewport preview to imagine the look of a finished film. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) system, in contrast, allows shots to be realised in a far more creative way. In a game engine, the filmmaker can accurately gauge the final look of the film and experiment with different styles.
Schirkoa was developed entirely in a game engine; “what you see on the screen is a living, breathing, immersive world. Technically, it is something new,” says Shukla. This, he feels, could be the future of animation filmmaking.
Schirkoa
Bhattacharya’s Heirloom combines embroidery and digital animation. It was an “organic choice. The characters interact with a woven tapestry, so it felt right to make those scenes using the embroidery technique”. His NID years exposed Bhattacharyya to Ahmedabad’s textile heritage, and he also got textile designer Maitri Ravishankar, also from NID, to work on the embroidery. While mixed-media animation features exist, as do films using frame-by-frame embroidery, it hasn’t been attempted in this way before, says Bhattacharyya, “especially not as a celebration of Indian fabrics. The design and techniques are hyperlocal, from the craft in Gujarat. So, we are taking inspiration from kathi appliqué, tangaliya technique, patola weaving, and others”.
Heirloom
Ranade, meanwhile, believes opportunity lies in adversity. “AI is here. What that’s going to do predominantly in its first phase is replace skill,” he says. In the next two-three years, “five AI artists in LA would be able to execute an entire animation film”, and this will affect India “because most of our animation studios do back-end work for Hollywood. However, he feels the threat of redundancy will be great for Indian animation. “We will start giving importance to creating our own stories, if not for aesthetic reasons, for sheer survival.”
Bhattacharyya places himself firmly in the optimists column, too. “It’s [animation in India] a very vibrant space, and there are a lot of people doing very good work. The challenge is to get more of them to think that filmmaking is a good idea,” he says. “Before we think of features, we must have a robust system in place to help get first- and second-time directors’ short films off the ground — give them a festival life, a distribution channel, and opportunities to experiment with their techniques and storytelling. If they know they can make a living in animation, the main gap will be filled.”
The writer is a New Delhi-based film critic.
