Indian Animation : A Brief Intro
The first attempt at animation dates back to the Palaeolithic Age, when the drawings made depict motion. The first attempt at animation dates back to the Palaeolithic Age, when the drawings made depict motion. Other attempt includes a 5,200-year-old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-e-Sukhteh. The bowl has five images painted along the sides, showing a goat leaping up to nip at a tree.
The Indian Animation goes back to the early twentieth century when ‘Dadasaheb Phalke’ made the first animated film by India ‘Agkadyanchi Mouj’ in 1915. The first animated movie released in theatres was ‘The Pea Brothers’ directed by Gunamoy Banerjee in 1934. It was made 22 years later after the initial attempt. In 1934, ‘On a Moonlight Night’, the first animated film with a soundtrack was produced. Credited to composer and orchestra leader R.C. Boral. In 1943, Satyajit Ray made a stop-motion film using matchsticks. During the 1950’s, the India Film Division set up Cartoon Film Unit. In 1956 Clair Weeks, an American Animator, was invited by the Indian Film Division to train Animation to Indian aspirants. In 1957, ‘The Banyan Deer’ is produced under the supervision of Clair Weeks. In 1974, ‘Ek Anek Aur Ekta’, a short film animated by Bhimsain is released on Doordarshan. In 1992, the India-Japan joint venture ‘Ramayana’ Directed By Yugo Sako and Ram Mohan is released. In 2005 India’s first full-length Traditional Animated film Hanuman is released, and in 2008 India’s First Computer-animated film is released.
Clair Weeks in India
Clair Weeks was an American and worked as an Animator at the Walt Disney Studios. Clair Weeks was born in India on September 14,1911.
Weeks began his career at the Disney studio in 1936, working on Snow White.
He spent a total of sixteen years at Disney serving mainly as a clean-up assistant, advisory consultant, and a character Animator. Also, during this time, Weeks participated in the 1941 Cartoon Animators’ Strike and also served in World War II in 1943. After the war, he returned to Disney in 1946. In 1956, Weeks was invited to the Films Division of India (FDI) in Bombay, India to establish and train the country’s first animation studio as part of the American Technical Co-Operation mission. He trained a core group of Indian animators, including Ram Mohan and Bhimsain. During his time in India he made a film called The Banyan Deer in 1957.
During the late seventies and early eighties Weeks taught at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India.
Clair Weeks died of cancer on August 26, 1996 in California.
The Banyan Deer
The Banyan Deer was an animated film released in 1959 and was based on a Bhuddhist Jataka tale. It combined the Ajanta fresco and Disney drawing styles. Between 1956 and 1957, the Films Division, with the financial help of UNESCO and the US Technical Aid Programme, brought Clair Weeks, an animator from the Disney Studio, to India for an intensive training period, which resulted in some of India’s best animators such as Ram Mohan and Bhimsain. Clair Weeks, coming from the Disney tradition, had brought with him material from previous Disney films to instruct the animators he was training. He had with him the model sheets from the well-known film Bambi. The protagonist of the film was a deer, this seemed like an appropriate point to help connect the newly minted animators to the subject in their own film.
The model sheets from Bambi were used to instruct them in the area of character design. The rules of classical animation were being imparted to the animators, the examples came from Bambi.
Ram Mohan
Ram Mohan is known as The Father of Indian Animation. Ram Mohan was born in 1931. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Madras and later moved to Mumbai for his post-graduate study but gave it up to join the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division, Government of India in 1956. He received training in animation techniques from Clair Weeks of Walt Disney Studios under the US Technical Aid program. Ram Mohan remained a key animator of the period and worked with the Films division till the late 1960’s. Ram Mohan started out by doing character design and story boards for This Our India, an animated film adapted from a book by Minoo Masani. He scripted, designed and animated many of Cartoon Film unit’s productions from 1960 to 1967, including ‘Homo Saps’ which won the National Award for Best Experimental Film, 1967, and ‘Chaos’ which won an award at the Leipzig Festival of short films in 1968. He participated in the 1967 world retrospective of Animation Cinema in Montreal. In 1968 he left Films Division and joined Prasad Productions as chief of their animation division. In 1972, he established his own production studio, Ram Mohan Biographics, which worked on commercials and the animated feature Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama in 1992, which he co-directed in collaboration with Yugo Sako from Japan. Ram Mohan’s film credits include several animation sequences for mainstream filmmakers — an animated song for B.R. Chopra’s Pati Patni Aur Woh in 1978, a title sequence for Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi, a sequence for Mrinal Sen’s Hindi film, Bhuvan Shome. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2014.
Ram Mohan died on 11 October 2019.
Animation is one of the most beautiful medium of telling stories. Animation is an art form which will never die due to its extensive roots. In India, animation is emerging with great speed. More and more people are getting attracted towards this art form and are also looking at animation as a great career option. Animation is also welcome in the Indian Film Industry. More and more filmmakers are trying their hands at this beautiful medium of storytelling. Thus, it can be seen that animation is a very expressive and magnificent art form which has its use in so many things in the present scenario like movies, games, design, architecture, transport and medical science.
Animation as a form of entertainment has evolved considerably and transcended age barriers. With its new approach, the genre now appeals to adults as much as to children. Within India itself, experts have envisaged that even though growth for this industry will be exponential in the short-term, the industry would need to ramp up the numbers of trained manpower. But India has a lot to catch up on. India is a famous outsourcing place for countries like the U.S., France etc. Nasscom reports that the size of the animation entertainment industry in 2008 is USD 107 million, of which 27 % is for domestic consumption, and 73 % is from off-shored demand. According to the companies that are focusing on outsourcing, 90 % of their businesses is outsourcing to Europe and the U.S. countries. One of the major reasons why Indian companies prefer outsourcing animation for foreign countries is that it can be a big business comparing it to producing animation for the domestic market. In other words, the domestic animation market is not so big, and the popularity of Indian animation in India is not so high.
