Every newspaper article or analyst report about the Indian animation industry inevitably makes the following two points:
- The cost of production in India is really low
- There’s a huge reservoir of traditional stories and mythology that can be tapped for content
To be honest, I’ve resorted to these cliches myself, for my New Product Development term paper. And they’re true. The only problem is that nobody in India seems to be looking beyond the huge reservoir of traditional stories. Nobody’s trying to create original characters. There are no twenty-first century ‘junior detectives’ or funny talking animals. Instead, all we’ve had in the past few years are Hanuman, Tenali Raman, Vikram and Vetaal, the Pandavas, Akbar Birbal, and Son of Alladin.
This is probably because there’s no Indian animator big enough to take risks on creating its own characters. After all even Disney did nothing but rip off the Brothers Grimm for fifty years of animated features. Unfortunately, it also leads to a creative drought where we get the same characters over and over again. Indian animators don’t compete by responding to a Shrek with a Nemo, but by rendering Krishna with 16000 polygons instead of 10000. Sad.
Oh, and there’s sometimes this: “The Simpsons is colored in S. Korea, and now Indian animators can do it for a tenth of that cost.”
After all even Disney did nothing but rip off the Brothers Grimm for fifty years of animated features.
Umm, not entirely true. Disney’s early feature film hits like “Fantasia” and “Bambi” (or even “Steamboat Willie”) were highly original works of cinema.
But yeah, valid point.
Yeah, I forgot Fantasia. My bad. Though somehow they milked Snow White the most.
While your reasoning is quite true, it must also be added that our animation films have been pretty sad till date. It took a Japanese co production to finally produce a good Ramayan. Even Hanuman is just about ok. So, while rendering Krishna out of more polygons might seem stale, atleast someone is doing it. Till now, we had a krishna out of a single polygon or worse, a square!
Hah. Fair enough.