How small animation studios are drawing in regional films

A silent revolution has been sweeping across the Indian animation industry over the past decade. While media attention has been firmly focussed on a handful of big studios like Crest, Prime Focus, DQ Entertainment and Rhythm & Hues, more than a thousand small, artist-driven ‘boutique’ studios have established themselves across the country, both in metros like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore as well as smaller towns like Coimbatore, Bhubaneshwar and Jabalpur.

With teams of 5 to 50 artists, they are buoyed by the burgeoning demand for animation and visual effects in domestic advertising, television and regional film industries. While the big studios were preoccupied with riding the outsourcing wave, the small studios took on projects that were too small to interest the big guys.
Mumbai-based Animagic India is typical of this lot. Started in 1997 by three artists, Sumant Rao, Gayatri Rao and Chetan Sharma, their first animated film Raju & I for NGO Aseema took two and a half years to develop but won several awards. Since then they have taken on all kinds of projects — preproduction, film titles, music videos, short films, and ad films. Their most recent work, Tripura — The Three Cities of Maya, is a 78-minute animated film, created by just five artists.

NID alumnus Suresh Eriyat has been through the exercise of setting up a small studio not once but twice. He first set up Famous House of Animation in partnership with Famous Studios Ltd. in 1998, creating animated ads and channel promos on Indian television. Then in 2009, when a project called for a service model kind of set-up, Suresh branched out to start Studio Eeksaurus with around 40 artists, creating 2D, 3D and stop motion animation, besides live action.

Recession-proof
While the global recession shook up big studios, most of the small studios sailed merrily along, buoyed by increasing domestic demand for animation in not just films and advertising but also other fields like gaming, medicine, education and simulation. A few small studios that catered to overseas clients were affected but found it easier to buckle down and battle recession than their bigger counterparts.

The animation industry is also no longer restricted to the metros. Regional films, television and music videos provide ample opportunities for the little studios in smaller towns. Clients prefer them too because they don’t have to go far to get their projects animated. The Jharkhand government, for instance, has had some of its best promotional animated films created right in its backyard. Patna is now a major hub for rotoscoping and film conversion. And studios in Chandigarh churn out video after video for Punjabi music companies.

It is no secret that many Tamil and Telugu films have budgets that often dwarf those of Bollywood’s biggest films. The Rajinikant starrer Endhiran (Robot) rivalled Hollywood in terms of both budget and visual effects. While international studios were roped in for the animatronics and stunt choreography, the film-makers turned to Hyderabad-based Firefly Creative Studio led by the trio of Sanath, Phani and Nagesh, for the entire pre-visualisation of the film. This award-winning studio has made its name by focussing solely on VFX for regional cinema and recently completed Disney’s first Indian fantasy film Anaganaga O Dheerudu.

United they stand
A rapidly growing trend is that of active collaboration across projects by small studios. Much of the post-production and visual effects in Bollywood and regional films involve the efforts of two or more small studios. The animation-live action combo film Toonpur Ka Superrhero that released in 2010 had more than 200 animators, artists and compositors working in six different locations, from four different studios, all micromanaged from director Kireet Khurana’s own little studio 2NZ Animation in Mumbai that did the entire pre-production for the movie.

It is also common practice for a big studio to share a big project with smaller studios specialising in certain aspects of the production process, thus eliminating the need to hire specialists required only for a specific project. It won’t come as a surprise if the first big success story in Indian animation comes from not one, not two, but a group of small studios putting their heads and hands together.