T he Red Turtle is directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit and only animated in Studio Ghibli unlike Ghibli’s other films which are both directed and animated by Ghibli. To me it’s more a French film which is animated in Japan.
The combination between European and Japanese animation is beautiful. The story is French and it is a silent film. No animated Japanese or American film has been silent, whereas the French have done this time and again. You have The Triplets of Belleville and I myself have made animation films without using words. I feel the French really break boundaries when it comes to animation without feeling either influenced or bogged down by the Americans. Japan is not influenced by Disney, Pixar and the commercial animation we are exposed to.
The Europeans and Japanese manage to pull this off simply because they have created their own audience for these kinds of films within their own country. India should have something like this… the confidence of having the audience, the confidence of putting out films which are absolutely Indian, which can work with the Indian psyche. Producers shy away from animation in India saying they don’t have an audience. But then we have done nothing to create that audience.
For MAMI to be shifting this film from its children’s section to the main section is a wonderful thing, viewers can look at animation in the same way they look at documentary and fiction. This is probably a beginning. There are a lot of animation films which work very beautifully both for adults and children, yet because they are animation they are often forced into the children’s category. You lose out on a big part of the audience. Dudok de Wit’s films are very mature. They work at various levels and make you think about things far beyond children’s understanding.
The importance of Studio Ghibli
I have a lot of respect for Ghibli films and have been inspired by them. Their storytelling is very similar to our traditional mythological storytelling. It is an Oriental space where there are layers and layers of stories, there are stories within stories, there are characters which live beyond the film. It’s like the Ramayana or the Mahabharata which is so huge that any story can be told about the characters. This is different from storytelling in the West. Japan has created an audience with things like manga [comics]. They created a whole world where people of all ages are engaged with these stories. People already know these characters. You know that these stories are going to work and that money is going to be recovered and therefore it is flourishing.
Their tradition of narrative storytelling is very rich just like ours and it can be used in any form of performing art. Look at the colours they use, the stylisation of the characters — Ghibli has borrowed from other forms of Japanese art like Noh theatre, shadow puppetry and textiles. All their arts are linked; it is so well-defined within its own culture.
The Indian scenario
The last animation film which was [shown] at MAMI was Shilpa Ranade’s Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya , which is a beautiful film. It’s exactly what a Ghibli film gives you: a folk tale. It was animated very courageously in spite of Ray having made a film on it. It’s done in a very Indian shadow puppet style. But it’s a one-off. There are a few of us trying to do something Indian. So much of the animation work is outsourced work for studios outside India. There is a lot of money and people get jobs but it is a business, it is not filmmaking.
The commercial filmmaking has also stopped after Roadside Romeo and Koochie Koochie Hota Hai and a couple of other films. We haven’t seen any films being made in the last four or five years. A lot of animation education is happening, a lot of students are coming out but they don’t know where to get jobs. It’s just five or six of us practising against something like Bollywood, Walt Disney animation, even Miyazaki or European animation. It’s being stifled but for some reason all of us are going on.
You spend so many years making a film and then it doesn’t even get released, no one sees it. This industry is very unpredictable. Some of us continue the fight, others succumb to the pressures. To me it’s in a state of coma. It might come alive or you might just have to pull the plug.
NFDC was funding art cinema in the 60s, that’s where all our gems came from. Animation is at the same stage where live action was at that time. You need government support. That to me is the solution — the NFDC kind of support.
(As told to Sucheta Chakraborty)
