Read more
This book explores Indian animation, a sector in rapid transition. Major studios have built international reputations through outsourcing and co-production, while smaller studios and independent filmmakers increasingly create original content for TV, streaming platforms and festivals. Alongside these visible transformations in the industry, artisanal and ethnographic animation have also flourished. India Animated: Essays on Contemporary Practice examines key ways in which practices and preoccupations in India are shifting. Distinctive postcolonial approaches are the focus of this volume, which foregrounds the inventive animation works of filmmakers in recent decades. Substantial essays consider the conception, production and marketing of animated works, alongside a selection of interviews that provide a vivid, granular sense of creative processes. Indian animation remains largely overlooked in both public discourse and scholarly research. This volume addresses that absence by examining the region s pluriform practices and their broader implications for animation studies.
List of contents
Chapter 01: Introduction to India Animated.- Part I: Contextualizing the Contemporary.- Chapter 02: Dreams of Silly Storks and Foxes: Indian Animation before Independence.- Chapter 03: Meena, a girl from my village: symbol of empowerment since the 90s.- Part II: Diversifying Practices Today.- Chapter 04: Animating Voices: a place for collaborative storytelling.- Chapter 05: Designing Native Narratives: Nonfiction Animation Claims in Indian Documentary.- Chapter 06: Tailing the Body of Hanuman: Mythological Animation and the Transnational Imagination.- Chapter 07: Ganesha Is My Friend and Krisha is a Fan: Hindu Boy-Gods Mirroring of Indian Middle Class Identity in Hindi Mythological Composite Films.- Chapter 08: Getting Over the Breakout Feature: Evolving Animation Festival and Streaming Ecologies.- Chapter 09: Reimagining Gender and Identity: The Animated Works of Gitanjali Rao.- Part III: Interviews with Practitioners.- Chapter 10: Immersive Animation and Indian Gods: An Interview with Charuvi Agrawal.- Chapter 11: Be Global, but be Original, Go Back to Where You Come From: An Interview with Ishu Patel.- Chapter 12: An Interview with Vaibhav Kumaresh.
About the author
Timothy Jones
is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Director of the Academic Media Center at Robert Morris University, USA. His work on animation, education, and industry appears in journals such as
Animation Practice
,
Process & Production
,
Animation Studies
and
Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
, as well as in the edited collections
Reconceptualizing Film Policies
(2018) and
Animation and Advertising
(2019). Tim contributes regularly to
Animation Studies 2.0
, and co-hosts the podcast
Spirited Animation
.
Anitha Balachandran
is a filmmaker, researcher and adjunct professor of animation at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, India. Her work engages with visual culture, media history, and the intersections of illustration, image-making, and animation within transcultural contexts. Anitha's writing has been published in the
Journal of Illustration
,
Imago: Studi di cinema e media
,
Animation Practice, Process & Production
,
Animation Studies 2.0,
and the
Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies
.
Summary
This book explores Indian animation, a sector in rapid transition. Major studios have built international reputations through outsourcing and co-production, while smaller studios and independent filmmakers increasingly create original content for TV, streaming platforms and festivals. Alongside these visible transformations in the industry, artisanal and ethnographic animation have also flourished.
India Animated: Essays on Contemporary Practice
examines key ways in which practices and preoccupations in India are shifting. Distinctive postcolonial approaches are the focus of this volume, which foregrounds the inventive animation works of filmmakers in recent decades. Substantial essays consider the conception, production and marketing of animated works, alongside a selection of interviews that provide a vivid, granular sense of creative processes. Indian animation remains largely overlooked in both public discourse and scholarly research. This volume addresses that absence by examining the region’s pluriform practices and their broader implications for animation studies.
