In a brand new avatar

In the basement of a nondescript building in Mahim, artists and animators are pouring over a sketch. “Hanuman is being very stubborn,” declares Ashwin Parulkar, creative producer at the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) studio.

For two months Parulkar and his team have been trying to get the animated form of Hanuman (from the Ramayan) right. “There is a particular scene I remember from the epic,” he says. “After Hanuman burns Lanka, a crestfallen Ravana admits ‘Hanuman was a difficult challenge. I underestimated him.’ Well, so did I.”

But, despite these difficulties, most of the animation work has been wrapped up, and ACK Media, which recently tied up with Turner International India, will soon be releasing 26 TV episodes from the comic on Cartoon Network and Pogo. Two animation films are also slated for release next year based on Amar Chitra Katha — Tripura: The Three Cities of Maya and Sons of Rama.

Myths for the new generation
This venture is the latest attempt to make mythological stories accessible to a generation that surfs TV channels and logs on to the web more often than it picks up a book. The producers are hoping that the characters and stories in Amar Chitra Katha will make the series appealing even though other programmes based on the same myths have been made in the past.

Samir Patil, CEO, ACK Media is clear about his strategy. “We grew up on a staple diet of Tinkle and stories from Amar Chitra Katha. But kids these days have different tastes. Today if you don’t exist on television or the internet, then you don’t exist at all. So we plan to surround children with different forms in which they would like to consume these stories.”

Patil, a former McKinsey consultant, acquired ACK in 2007 from India Book House, the original publishers, with the idea of tapping various media formats for the property.

Apart from the coming TV programmes and films, Vodafone already sells ACK comics, wallpapers and ring tones. Then ACK Media recently launched an online multiplayer game, The Legend of Katha, based on the comic book.

The company has also partnered with iRemedi Corp of Atlanta to deliver ACK comics to the iPhone. A new website allows people across the globe to purchase the comics on www.amarchitrakatha.com and also read e-comic versions of their favourite tales. ACKpedia, a project in the pipeline, aims to create a free online encyclopedia on the lines of Wikipedia and Google Knol but “with a sharp focus on everything Indian and will explore the millions of places, people and cultures that make up India”.

A vacuum in kids’ entertainment
Hugely popular in the 1970s with a circulation of over 1 lakh copies, the comics saw a drop in sales with the advent of private TV channels in the nineties. “We were fighting a losing battle. Our circulation dropped to a mere 11,000 copies and our offices were shut down for a brief period,” remembers Chandrakant Rane, an illustrator with Amar Chitra Katha for the past 32 years.

The circulation has improved in the past two years, and Patil hopes the TV series will give it a real boost. “Recently when a number of shows based on mythological characters were launched, our comic book sales picked up, although we had nothing to do with those shows,” points out Patil.

Amar Chitra Katha also hopes to fill a vacuum in children’s entertainment on TV, which is mostly limited to dubbed American Hannah Montanas and Japanese Narutos. “We have produced shows based on Indian mythological characters in the past and they have been more popular than the international ones.

With ACK there is an added advantage — kids already relate to these stories. It has archives of over 500 titles and that gives us the scope to explore a variety of topics,” says Monica Tata vice president and deputy general manager — Entertainment Networks, South Asia, Turner International India.

An artistic challenge
The main challenge lies in turning the comic characters into cartoons, which is both time-consuming and also demanding in a creative sense. For Parulkar, the priority was to maintain ACK’s signature style.

“It was difficult to incorporate the brush strokes used in the drawings and to get the characters to look right from all angles. Amar Chitra Katha is unique because they have stayed true to the Indian body form and anatomy. Most of the Indian mythological animated characters we see on television today still look like Pocahontas or random cartoons from the west,” he explains. The only way out, Parulkar realised, was to get the old comic artists on board.

Shyam Desai and Rane, who have been working for decades with the company, look visibly excited to see their old comic characters begin to move and talk on screen. Just like Tintin’s creator Herge studied architecture and fashion before sketching certain scenes in his comic, Desai and Rane too have had to research history before adapting it in comic format.

“In those days there was no internet. We used to sit for hours in the Asiatic library to study what the drapery and architecture was like in the 17th and 18th centuries before sketching characters for stories of Shivaji. When we did a comic on the Indian freedom struggle, we went back to the independence era to understand what the British wore, and what their body structure was like,” reminisces Rane.

Now again they have had to go back to the drawing board, albeit digitally, as their comics take a new form. “It’s a rebirth,” smiles Rane.

The animation is faster, sleeker and more dramatic than the comic. Titles that lend themselves to such a treatment have been carefully chosen from the archives. “For instance, Ramayan is a thrilling story and Hanuman is an action-packed hero,” says Parulkar.

“The cartoon is modern too,” says Desai. That means archaic language is out and ‘Pitashri’ and ‘Bhratashri’ find no place in the script.

The project has taken over a year to fall in place. Finally, after months of sketching and resketching, the studio organised a test screening to gauge audience response. The moment the characters came on screen, the kids jumped and said they look straight out of Amar Chitra Katha comics, beams Parulkar. “That is when I knew the project was a success.”