Written by Sonaxi Satpathy & Madhura Prakash
Edited by Shreya Srinivasan
Illustrated by Shresha Kumarn
Running back home after school and sitting in front of the TV to watch our favorite cartoons is one of the fondest memories that comes to mind when talking about childhood nostalgia. To a lot of people, shows like Doraemon, Shinchan, Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and many more are the definition of childhood cartoons. It's interesting how all these beloved animations are either mostly American or Japanese. So what about Indian animation?
We can start this discussion by noting that India definitely has an animation industry, and with a population of about 139 crore, it's safe to say that the country has talent as well. To prove this, we can take a look at the 2012 movie Arjun: The Warrior Prince. This movie has top-notch animation, which is very well worthy of world-wide recognition, but in spite of this, it couldn’t even recover half of its budget at the box office. After a decade, the quality of animation seen on TV seems to have degraded, with the exact same style of animation for every other cartoon where, except for the main characters, nothing else seems to be well developed. From a profit-oriented perspective, this makes sense as mass producing low quality animation is easier and requires less time and money. Indian animation studios like Prime Focus and Dhruva Interactive, whose names are associated with international blockbusters, primarily only do outsourcing and provide their services to firms in other countries. This is a safe bet, as the income is stable and secured, irrespective of how well the final project performs.
Another element is good storytelling, or rather, the lack of it in most Indian cartoons today. Most of them have the same format for each of their episodes. The same can be said for celebrated shows like Phineas and Ferb, but what makes this show better is that it has continuous character development and world-building. Most cartoons today are either lazily ripped-offs of popular Bollywood films such as Smashing Simmba and Dabangg or uncreative rebrandings of popular foreign animated stories.
Popular Indian animations are also promoting immoral subjects. When we take a deeper look, we see that there are some cartoons that normalize body shaming and name calling. For example, in cartoons like Motu Patlu and Lambu Tingu, the characters are named that way because of their body types. The primary demographic for these shows is kids, and they have been shown to imitate what they observe. This means that India’s youth get an early crash course in pointing out and making fun of people’s body types. To add to this, in the cartoon Chhota Bheem, the character Kalia, who is the bully, is portrayed as a person who is fat and has a darker skin color. This also normalizes certain stereotypes, and the fact that he has a darker skin tone normalizes colourist comments.
Society isn’t structured in a way to help children unlearn these harmful lessons; hence, they imbibe them into their worldview. Such stereotypes are not only evident in cartoons; but, they are also evident and can be witnessed in our real society. At a very young age, children start using these names, and they fail to understand that such actions can hurt some people to a great extent.
In spite of everything, there have been some good cartoons over the years. A close-to-heart example would be Krish Trish and Baltiboy; this show animated interesting folk stories in various folk and tribal art forms. Some more examples are The Return of Hanuman, the Krishna series by Green Gold, My Friend Ganesha (semi-animated), and Ramayan: The Legend of Prince Ram (Indian Japanese collaboration). There is also an in production Indian animation called "Daredevil Mustafa," which has released its trailer with impressive and breathtaking animation. These shows act as our beacon of hope for the Indian animation industry.
Comments