Bhagmati – Queen of India’s animation fortunes

Written by Kireet Khurana

There is many things in common with Ashok Kaul and Thomas Alva Edison. Both are pioneers, inventive, had relentless perseverance and took failures as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks.

It took six years for Ashok Kaul’s Bhagmati – India’s first live animation feature film with team comprising mainly of animation students to fructify! Bhagmati did not register at the box office too. Yet when you meet the man himself, the passion and the commitment of Bhagmati is infectious and inescapable. It’s a journey he cherishes and stands by.

Dubbed as India’s first live-action and animation combination film ‘Bhagmati’- ‘The Queen of Fortunes’ is the legend of the famed love story of prince Mohammed Qutab Quli Shah and the beautiful dancer Bhagmati. History says the fourth Qutab Shahi ruler built the city of Hyderabad at the behest of his ladylove. In the film, animated characters interact with the live action ones and the lead pair of Tabu and Milind Soman.

“India has no footprint to make a fully animated film. Bhagmati has been a completely new endeavor in which the art of animation has been used for story-telling” observes National award winning director Ashok Kaul in an exclusive interview to Studio Systems who has also worked with Raj Kapoor for a decade. He explains in length the joys and pains of Bhagmati.

The beginning:

Bhagmati was conceptualized and launched at a time when there were no animators. Subhash Chandra Goyal of Zee invited Kaul to join him in making meaningful movies that would contribute in totality to Indian cinema.

When Kaul visited Zee Institute of Creative Art (ZICA) he saw over 250 young students learning animation from inception and attempting to make their own characters. Kaul soon started teaching in ZICA culminating in a strong bonding student-teacher relationship and honing of the skills, which was to be cornerstone for Bhagmati’s execution. At one point the 200+ students approached Kaul and expressed dismay at the lack of an exciting opportunity in animation.

Meanwhile, Kaul was invited by John Canvekar, an animator and a teacher at New York University to talk to his students on Bollywood movies. It is here that Kaul resolved make an animated feature film, a film with an intensity of love and historical heritage familiar to India. There was a spontaneous positive response. Kaul realized in the din of clapping that indeed the concept of passionate love in history is unique to India. “I had no idea how to transform the bud into flower” says Kaul. But the seeds of the vision for the challenging future were sowed. He knew it was going to be a time consuming task but passion to create a new genre that would go down in the history of animation industry in India was very inviting.

To equip himself to finer technical and creative nuances of animation Kaul later visited Walt Disney, UCLA and studios in Chicago.

Back home, he chalked out an ambitious plan and trained the Zica students which took him nearly one and a half year. He conceived the idea of translating the characters into live animated characters similar to the making of Spielberg’s movie Prince of Egypt. He decided to make this film in cinemascope as there was no cinemascope animation movie made till then.

Technical Issues:

“I had to face many hurdles. One was of money, the normal cost to make animation film is $25 million to $85 million and to shell out such a huge amount was difficult. Then the challenge to train 200 young students to become technically competent. Then that of limited infrastructure, etc.” explains Kaul. Bhagmati was made for a paltry $2million in comparison! Indeed, pioneers are saddled with problems with no roadmap. And they learn to overcome it too.

Using digital technology time could be saved so he opted for Animo by UK based – Cambridge Animation Systems for its vector based technology which would help with film resolution render. His students underwent extensive training on it. Kaul chose the Cinemoscope format over the Academic format for its appeal and grandeur in Indian films. But having cinemascope as a format was a bigger headache than Kaul had realized as there was no software support for this format. Several tests and digital transfers were done with the material processed at Prasad labs in Chennai on a weekly basis, making it a tedious process. After 6 months of laborious trial and error tests, the Cinemascope issue was resolved through the clever, ingenious solutions that Indians are usually credited with worldwide. In fact, head of Cambridge animation systems visiting ZICA was so impressed by the simple yet ingenious process of adapting the animators and software to the rather awkward aspect ratio of Cinemascope films that he stole the templates from ZICA for his reference!

Also the animators had no understanding on the strengths of the cinemascope framing. So Kaul spent significant time and effort with workshops in actual camera lenses and films, explaining in detail on the aspect ratio of cinemascope and its impact on compositions in film designing. In the end it all paid off. Bhagmati happens to be the animated first film worldwide using the cinemascope format!

Kaul also recognized that 3D was the medium of the future. Therefore the backgrounds for Bhagmati were modeled and rendered using Maya software, yet another first of its kind for a feature in India.

Processes and Pipelines:

Typically productions of Bhagmati’s magnitude required 40+ licences of Animo softwares. However, Cambridge systems people were amazed to learn that the entire Bhagmati feature was done with 2 Animo licences and 4 Ink & Paint licences only, speaking volumes of the dedication and the precise management processes of the feature.

Acting workshops, an extensive director’s script ingeniously designed by Kaul himself helped the animators understand every single aspect of the shot/s they were working on. This detailed note included the mood of scene, story and dialogues, expressions of characters, camera angles and camera moves, visual effects note and deliverable deadlines. This process took care of all queries of the animator that might arise.

“Line tests”, a system of checking the line-drawings of the classical animators using digital technology were checked by Kaul on an hourly basis.

Post- Production:

Some of the special effects were done in Chennai, outside of ZICA.

“…I had to fight on every step, teach each step. So the challenges were several, technically, emotionally, infrastructure wise, patience and motivation. The pressure was tremendous. But 2 things kept me going. One was the perseverance and secondly was the perseverance and three the love and affection of the young students”.

Future of animation industry

When Kaul visited places like UCLA, Walt Disney, he found the technicians were very good. But he felt that our young Indian artists are far more talented and they had no outlet. Like Edison, Kaul did not get daunted by the string of failures of Bhagmati. He took those setbacks in the stride and merely used failures as stepping stones. His positivity and optimism is indeed infectious.

When questioned about the box office failure of his film, Kaul dismisses them and stands solidly behind his labour of love. He feels that with Bhagmati, the awareness of animation has grown in India and he is proud of his contribution. Bhagmati has indeed been a stepping stone that a pioneer has built for future generation of Indian animators to follow as an example and benchmark of what is possible by sheer determination. One must especially commend the fact that Bhagmati was conceived and produced at a time when India did not have any animation culture, background or wherewithal.

In these intense four years, Kaul worked on an average for 14 hours a day with no holidays. The only day he took off was due to a personal loss – his mother passed away.

“During the making, the thought which converted into a vision, last 10 years have been the IT boom the next 10 years could be the animation boom.” Today with Bhagmati there is a knock that India has arrived said Kaul