Indian Animation, VFX, And Video Games Take Center-Stage This Weekend At Animela Festival In Mumbai

Animela, billed as India’s first-ever international festival for animation, vfx, xr, video games, and comics, will take place this weekend in Mumbai.

The multi-media event was developed to spotlight creative and technological advancements in the animation and visual arts fields. More than just an annual get-together, Animela will host smaller events throughout the year to help professionals, students, and enthusiasts engage with the animation industry.

Animela 2024 will open with Spanish filmmaker Isabel Herguera’s Sultana’s Dream, followed by a question and answer session with Herguera and her Spanish and Indian crews, including Indian animation expert Upamanyu Bhattacharyya. The film, much of which unspools in India, won four awards at the San Sebastián Intl. Film Festival last year and is nominated for two Spanish Academy Goya Awards this year.

According to festival director Kireet Khurana:

India is making content on par with international standards but lacks a narrative as a creator of world-class content. With Animela, we intend to align with our government’s thrust of Create-In-India and build a platform of international pedigree with the goal of exhibiting excellent films, games, and other forms of visual arts created by Indian independent talent and studios to a larger audience and promote them internationally. At the same time, the festival provides for a holistic artistic and technological reflection in the AVGC space by bringing global industry veterans and emerging Indian talents under one roof.

Here are five highlights from this year’s Animela program.

India Shorts Program

Arguably, the most exciting part of any international animation event is seeing local artists’ work that may get lost in the sea of titles at events in other countries. This family-friendly sidebar features 18 short films from promising Indian creators that were released over the last two years:

• This Socks, Ananya Bashyam
• As A Man, Soumitra Ranade
• Hog-Tied Freedom, Shaheen Sheriff, Sunakshi Puri
• Moonless, Adheep Das
• Ai.liminate, Himanshu Bheniye
• CCC, Aishwarya Avinash Chaudhari, Siddharth Modi
• Raavi Paar, Mark D’Rozario
• Kyaa Hai Yeh Samjhauta?, Hansa Thapliyal
• Spirit of The Forest, Kal Sanghvi, Nirupa Rao, Nandini Rao
• Tame Keva?, Jignesh Chavda
• Barsaat, Vipin Samuel
• Metamorphosis, Archit Vaze
• The Animated Life of SL Bhatia, Meera Krishnamurthy
• The Heart of Akhnar, Debayan Paul
• This Is TMI, Subarna Dash, Vidushi Gupta
• Arana Puranam, Adhiti Krishnadas
• Hocchey Ta Ki?, Sneha Das
• Lucky Dog (World Premiere)

VFX Unveiled

India’s RRR took the world by absolute storm in 2022, and one of the film’s vfx supervisors, Srinivas Mohan, will be at this year’s Animela to discuss his work on the film. Mohan is a 25 vfx vet who has worked on several groundbreaking Indian features, including Baahubali: The Beginning and Endhiran. Arka Mediaworks co-founder and CEO Shobu Yarlagadda will also be in attendance to talk about the work done by his company on titles such as Vedam, Maryada Ramanna, and the megahit Baahubali franchise.

Animela-IMC Pitch

Animela will host an itinerant version of Annecy’s MIFA Campus in which five local artists or teams of artists will participate in an intensive four-day workshop with mentors from Annecy. Following the workshop, each participant will present their project at the Animela – IMC Pitch event, giving attendees an early look at some of the most exciting local projects currently in development. The projects will also be presented to international buyers, producers, and distributors at the India Pitch Session at Annecy in June. This year’s participants are animator Pari Satarkar, filmmaker Krishna Chandran, filmmaker Isha Mangalmurti, writing-directing duo Dhruv Sehgal and Debjyoti Saha, and filmmaker Rituparna Sarkar with her designer Sruti Menon.

Cinematic Splendor from Across the Globe

While Animela is largely focused on promoting local animation, another of the festival’s goals is to bring global animation to India. To that end, event organizers have curated a selection of short and feature films from around the world that will screen at this year’s event. Among the titles set for this event are Bill Plympton’s Slide, DK and Hugh Welchman’s The Peasants, Mochel Ocelot’s The Pharaoh, The Savage and The Princess, Yoshimi Itazu’s feature debut The Concierge, Alberto Vázquez’s Unicorn Wars, and Pierre Földes’ Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Global Distribution Decoded

In the world of short film distribution, few agencies are doing work on par with that of French producer-distributor Miyu. This year, the company represented five of the fifteen animated shorts shortlisted for the Oscars. The company’s co-founder, Luce Grosjean, will be in Mumbai to discuss her experiences as a short film distributor and how the Miyu team has challenged perceptions about distributing animated shorts around the world.

Animela was created and is run by the Aniverse and Visual Arts Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to pursuing artistic and public service goals and improving the audiovisual landscape in India. The event is backed by a partnership with the government of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Annecy International Animation Festival.