A look of animation is something we prize. Talking to someone who appears woo-den is nothing but mounting irritation: you will find yourself looking away, and zoning out. What we need, to continue a conversation, or sustain interest, is a sparkle. And that’s what’s missing from Indian animation in cinema. It is drab, dull, almost inanimate, forcing you to find life in stick-like figures moving across bland, blurry landscapes. All of these thoughts were swimming in my mind, as my eye was tracking the insipid plotlines in Kochadaiiyaan, Rajinikanth’s opus — about kings and queens and valour and revenge in ancient India — which uses motion capture technology to enhance life-like effects. But beyond piling up the numbers — countless soldiers on battlefields, ships bobbing on the ocean, birds flying across the skies— there was no excitement. The plot felt old, and the treatment could well have been borrowed from a mothballed ’60s mythological, as it urged us to find movement and emotion through cacophonous background music. I had hopes from this film, which uses the most advanced form of capturing animated motion. Indian cinema has used 3D for quite a while, but has never been able to break through the stiffness and the “unreal” feel of 2D. There are, of course, issues of funds: a Hollywood film which uses the same technology runs through millions of dollars (James Cameron, for example, spent about $300 million on Avatar, and that was in 2009). An Indian film today would, typically, still cost less than a tenth of that staggering sum. So sure, size matters. Money can buy you gloss and spectacular visuals. What it can’t, is soul. I’m not a huge Avatar fan, but the look in the eye of the cyan-coloured creature as she gazes upon the one she loves touched me. When the old gent from Pixar’s Up sets off in that amazing techni-coloured ride of his, leaving his home behind, you wonder, will he be back again? When a little robot, a robot I tell you, makes me tear up in Wall E (also from the Pixar stables), why is it that a full-fledged human leaves me cold? Because breathing life on screen is not just about technology. It is about imagination. It is about breaking free. An animation film can take you to places and planets and parallel universes. Computer graphics can take us into space, and help us spiral through oxygen-less, soundless vistas, as we watch, heart-in-mouth: will the woman survive? Indian animation has been stuck in re-re-telling mythologicals and epic tales. But how many times can we watch Baby Krishna steal makkhan? Ditto for the long-winded, heavy-on-Sanskritised-Hindi tomes that are “inspired” by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. A few of these have made a stab at getting the animation right, but have failed in getting us to feel. Where are the young and the brave animators in Indian cinema that will tell me a story with newness and freshness and pizzazz? I’m all eyes.
