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For 11 years, animation producer Studio Eeksaurus has been broadcasting his advertising work on his YouTube channel – micro-shorts that reveal the medium’s commercial possibilities. Since January, Suresh Eriyat’s company started adding creative projects, including his Fisherwoman and Tuk Tuk and Tokri.
While Eriyat didn’t direct the most recent upload, he is the creative producer. The link is much deeper: that of Adithi Krishnadas Kandittund! is based on stories from Eriyat’s father, PNK Panicker. The 91-year-old storyteller also provides the voiceover for stories as big as they seem to be true.
Kandittund! (Seen It!) Consists of anecdotes about friendly and evil spirits that Panicker says he encountered during his long life in Kerala. These include a ghost that attacks pregnant women and one that takes care of your enemies for you.
Filled with whimsy and wit, the beautifully crafted black and white film is based on hand-drawn animation. The folk background music is by Nandhu Kartha and the sound design by Resul Pokutty. The film is self-funded, like all of Suresh Eriyat’s independent projects.
The large number of views Kandittund! has accumulated on YouTube is proof to Eriyat that there is a huge following for original animated stories in India. Yet local animated feature films are rare. The shortlist includes that of VG Samant Hanuman, Shilpa Ranade Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya and that of Gitanjali Rao Bombay Rose.
Eriyat hopes to one day be on this list. He’s been working on a feature film idea for some time, he said in an interview in his studio, which he established in 2009. The 48-year-old National Institute of Design graduate did his arms to the animation division of the famous Mumbai studio. .
At the Famous House of Animation, Eriyat and his team have created some of the most well-known animated commercials, while working on his own projects in parallel. “Fisherwoman and Tuk Tuk took six years – every time a paid project came up, we put it on the back burner, â€Eriyat said. “Tokri took eight years and was not completed until 2017. “Great patience is just one of the things animation in India needs to be successful,” said Eriyat Scroll. In.
Tell us about the inspiration for ‘Kandittund! ‘, Which made your father a celebrity in Kerala. Is he a professional writer?
No, it’s a civil servant who worked for the storage company. I attribute his talents as a storyteller to the women in his family. Her father passed away very early. I have the impression that he has heard a lot of stories like this from the women around him. [who raised him].
It received enormous media attention. We try to keep its anonymity intact so that it can function normally.
My father’s stories were pretty believable and I was convinced of it when I first heard them. They were always at the back of my mind and I felt they were gems that needed to be documented. I recorded these stories on my iPhone in 2015. I kept the recording all these years, thinking I would make a series of short films. I did some sketches too, but it didn’t fly.
Adithi Krishnandas, also an NID graduate, joined Studio Eeksaurus for this film. She is extremely talented and, being Malayali, could relate to these stories. She was 22 when we started the project in 2019.
Adithi drew his storyboards and I saw my father in his sketches. She came up with a style derived from a graphic novel. First there was color, but I felt black and white was enough.
This is of course a reverse analysis. Most of these creatures are born in the dark. A shadow becomes something, a plantain looks like something else.
Why didn’t you make the film yourself?
I didn’t do it because he’s someone who is very close to me. A sense of objectivity and distance was needed to view the film creatively. I saw an honest and sincere motivation in Adithi to undertake it. So I decided to give the film my energy and my resources.
I wanted the movie to be like an instruction manual for ghosts – dos and don’ts and troubleshooting. I also wanted to create a soundscape of Kerala from over 30 years ago. The sound alone took three to four months.
Doing Kandittund! in malayalam i also give language boost to fly beyond kerala. Otherwise, it becomes generic. That’s the beauty of animation. It does not stick to the borders of the language.
Will you be making other films on the subject?
I don’t want to limit myself to my father’s stories. I’m thinking of extending it to other languages ​​and cultures, going to people who are not stars, in that sense, getting them to talk about their stories.
There can be interesting voice textures, narrators. My father speaks in his own voice, it is a father who tells his son. There is a bit of mockery in the way I talk to him, but he’s not bothered. There can be such relationships where we can find dialogue between people.
I am planning another article on another topic. I am very interested in looking at the deep local.
Your films are self-financing with the money you earn from advertising. What are the challenges for animation filmmakers in India?
We work with a small team but it is still expensive. All of my films are self-funded because it’s the only way. You cannot wait for someone or an organization to come and support you. It’s non-existent in this country anyway.
When I created Famous House of Animation, we had these young people who joined us, people like Vaibhav Kumaresh and Gitanjali Rao. We wanted to make a difference. I was young and naive, which was good. I was not struck by the realities of the place.
But there were bubbles. People would come to us, then go to Hyderabad, then this bubble would burst, then they would go to Bangalore, then to Kerala and Delhi, then back to Bombay. The cloud of people continued to move. They were extremely talented but telling stories was not their prerogative. Even people who are trained to tell stories from the NID cannot continue after a while.
If you have to work with an established network and distributors, your film is already watered down. It is important to find like-minded people.
The Hindi film industry, for all its financial power, has paid little attention to animation. Yet Indian animators provide crucial visual effects services to Hollywood productions.
Animation is still seen as a cheaper way to make movies – that’s in itself a bad place to start. The Hindi film industry is not at the service of Hollywood, so it needs to hold on and keep producing things. But in terms of animation, the easy way is to serve the West and earn more money in that way rather than struggling to make your own movie.
If I hadn’t had publicity and personal status, it would have been difficult. Nobody asks you to make a movie, it’s a request that we create. For example, we ourselves funded the signature film used for the Mumbai International Film Festival in 2018. It was not commissioned.
If more animators are doing Indian stories, the perception will change. We did a good job on YouTube and that has changed. How else do we get all of these views? The viewers are there. We need more people to tell stories. Only then will there be more interest in animation.
For example, none of the films in our studio are for children. The perception is that animation is the equivalent of children’s cartoons, but we make films for all age groups.
A feature would have a huge impact, but funding is difficult. Tomorrow if I have the chance, I will make a feature film. But I don’t want people who don’t know anything about animation telling me what to do.
The people of Bollywood have tried and failed miserably because they still see animation as a technique and not as a different way of telling stories. If you don’t specialize in this medium, you can’t just animate a live story. You have to think about animation to write a story. This kind of writing is largely non-existent. If you do something that looks like Bollywood, what’s the point? You might as well shoot a movie.
When we release movies to our YouTube channel, there is no monetization. It’s just that our value increases in the other jobs that we do. In the advertising industry, people appreciate our work. Admittedly, advertising films were far ahead of any other cinematographic medium.
Read also :
Tireless and unrivaled: the debt that Indian animation owes to Ram Mohan
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