When I started working on this presentation, I had very vague idea about the animation industry back home. It is majorly because India doesn’t have an established animation culture as yet.

On research, I realised there are a couple of reasons for it. 

Animation sector is dwarfed by its giant neighbors and identity formation has been difficult. For instance, Japan has Manga which is globally recognised. Also, outsourcing represents the majority of the entertainment animation industry. High costs of production is another reason for the lack of home-grown movies.

Ram Mohan was an animator and educator considered to be the father of Indian animation.

One of the major reasons for picking this animator was not only because of his contribution to the animation industry but because he paved the way for a lot of current animators in India. He emphasised on the need of an infrastructure and an animation culture and mentored a lot of artists. 

He got a chance to train under Disney animator Clair Weeks in 1956,when the Cartoon Unit of the new government Films Division was set up. It is important to note here that did have an animation culture even in the pre-independence era, i.e., before 1947 but it was majorly categorized under “experiments”. Shadow-puppet animation and hand painted glass slides were used as long back as the 19th century but we had the Mughals ruling us and then the Brits for 100 years, so content creation was very restrictive.

Ram Mohan passed on in 2019, however he has left behind a legacy and has inspired a lot of new-age animators. There is a small but vocal group of animators who have taken it upon themselves and are trying to create innovative content. One such Animator is Vaibhav Kumaresh who is the founder of Kumar Studios. I had reached out to him with a couple of questions to understand the situation better.

One of the big questions was: What are the challenges you face in India as an animator? To which he replied, “In my case, the biggest challenge is to create and distribute high quality original Indian animated content – be it within India or abroad. And most importantly – do it in a financially successful and sustainable manner.”

The other question that he had answered was, What are your parameters for judging an animation? His answer was quite extensive but the crux of it according to him was, “Effective and unique storytelling, good command over the production quality, sound design and music”