08 Dec 2014  |   01:34pm IST

Giving voice to images

The father of Indian Animation, Ram Mohan was at IFFI 2014 to share his wisdom with aspiring animation students along. He was accompanied by Kireet Khurana, an animation director of today’s generation

Dolcy D’Cruz

For 80-year-old Ram Mohan, deftly drawing a sketch of Meena, a fictional character in the South Asian children’s television show, ‘Meena’, is a cakewalk. Ram Mohan, an Indian animator, title designer and design educator, is a veteran of the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division of India, Government of India in 1956 and went on to establish the Graphiti School of Animation in 2006.

He won the National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Animation Film twice, for ‘You Said It’ in 1972 and ‘Fire Games’ in 1983. He was awarded the Padma Shri award by the Government of India this year. “The child in me enjoys animation films. I still watch animation films from the US and from India. Most recently, I enjoyed the film ‘Frankenweenie’, which is a story of a dog who is brought back to life,” says Ram as he draws the sketch of Meena.

According to Ram Mohan, animation is based on storytelling, characters and performance. “The script has to be in a series of drawings for which every artist has to work on proportions of a character and lastly, it depends on the weaving of the drawings into a story through its expressions. Unfortunately, the animation in India is lacking because the stories are not told in an engaging way. The story should centred around the character,” explains Ram Mohan.

India is following the West and that is where the bridge is broken when it comes to great animation, “We should be Swadeshi and be true to our own roots. We should develop characters and incidents that seem plausible,” he opines.

On the other hand, Kireet Khurana, son of Bhimsain Khurana, a pioneer in animation in India, feels that that era of cartooning helped make animation in India what it is today. “We look up to their generation for everything. They were the building blocks that used technology that we many now consider outdated, but they created great works which are now helping India become an animation hub,” says Kireet who is working on a film on Saeed Mirza along with several other short films and ad films.

Kireet was recently acclaimed for his ten-minute short animation ‘Komal’, a film on child sexual abuse, produced by Childline India. “The film has about 10 million views and the UN has proclaimed it as the way short films should deal with the subject of child abuse. The art of animation is catching up in India and many animation artists in different productions have been touched by this genius in some way or the other,” concludes Kireet.