Indian Animation Industry - an overview

Indian animation industry was a late starter. For a very long time animation was considered an expensive proposition. As the Indian  film industry was evolving and dealing with issues of quality control and later piracy, animation took the back seat. It is not that animation wasn’t happening at all. Satyajit Ray, as a film maker, was one of the pioneers who experimented with animation.

Our nation got its first indigenous animation series only as late as 1989 when Mr. Suddhastawa Basu made 10 episode series of “Gayab Aaya”. The second landmark in the Indian animation industry was reached when Ram Mohan Studios, Mumbai, was able to synergise technical and creative work with the help of a japenese production house and eventually produced a 2D film called Ramayana (1993).

This film suddenly made international market sit up and take notice of Indian animation industry. However, at that point of time the Indian animation industry was in a naesant stage but displayed tremendous potential for growth. With in a few years India’s first full-fleged animation studio ZICA (Zee institute of creative Arts) was launched. India was slowly but surely becoming the destination for the big production houses in US and Europe who wanted to offshore their production work to a developing country. This was to enjoy the benefits of quality work at much lower cost. As a result work that was until then offshored to Philippines started finding its way to India.In 1999 the Indian animation industry finally took off, although doing most of the outsourced work and projects instead of products. There were few brave but futile attempts made by Indian producers and production houses in making complete films or animating certain parts of it, but they failed. The first success story was the movie ‘HANUMAN’ which was completed in 2005. This gave the Indian animation industry a much needed breakthrough on the intellectual property front. ‘HANUMAN’ proved that with good content , limited resources and a low budget an animation work could be created. Though it may not have set standards in terms of quality, it could generate revenue and accolades. This particular breakthrough suddenly opened the floodgates for the intellectual property market and generated a lot of interest in the whole industry for developing indigenous content; an area that remained untapped until now. Where we go from here , only time will tell. But with an industry that is pegged at $ 550 million, there is no doubt that Indian animation industry has got what it takes to reach the top.