Animated Pursuit

A princess trying to prove her bravery by saving her kingdom. Three suitors who are trying to woo her.

A princess trying to prove her bravery by saving her kingdom. Three suitors who are trying to woo her. And an old curse that threatens to destroy her land. These are some of the many disjointed elements in Pixar Studios’ latest animated film,Brave. But a very strong Pune connection makes the film more special in the Indian context. Camera and staging artist Arjun Rihan,who was born and bought up in the city,has worked on the animation and designing of the film. Rihan was a member of the core team that worked on creating the animation,the backgrounds and the characters of Brave .

A graduate from Bishop’s School s,Rihan quit the software business after he found it “dull and uninspiring” to study animation. I realised I wanted to do something more creative and fun. I wanted to do animations. I wanted to create characters,give them voices and make films, says the 32-year-old Rihan. What followed was a course in animation at the University of Southern California,and his own animated films,Topi ,Arjuna and Abridged. Some guys at Pixar saw my short films and bought me on board Pixar Studios for Brave. After training for a few months,we began work on the movie, he says.

Brave details the story of Princess Merida,who is an expert archer. After sabotaging an archery contest to determine her husband,she incurs the wrath of an old curse that threatens to destroy the kingdom of her parents. Work on the movie started in the fall of 2009, informs Rihan. Unlike a normal feature film where only the actors have to film at a given location,here we had to create the location for the characters to fit in. First we would make a drawing and then model the same in 3D. Then camera angles need to be decided. The actors come in,in the last part.

Another thing that Rihan discovered was that one needs to ask questions,constantly. Brave,unlike other animated films,has a very complex story line. So if we don’t want any errors to crop up in the later parts of the story,we need to sort out all design and animation related problems on the drawing board itself, he says. However,that doesn’t mean that problems have not cropped up for Rihan and his team. There are times when the directors have seen the finished product on the screen and found errors that we had not seen. It would mean we would have to go back to recreate the scene. But it was fun in its own way, he laughs.

Scheduled to release globally on June 18,Rihan has high hopes from the film. Every thing that has gone into making the film has only made it better. We would love to see people react positively to it, he says.

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