Whether or not India at large has embraced dystopia, its cinema hasn’t. Barring some valiant blips, dystopian narratives haven’t caught on in our films. One hindrance could be the practical limitations of live-action filmmaking, not to mention censorship. There is, on account of this, a thrilling workaround: indie animation. With so much freeware and fancy tools floating around, and the call to subversion inherent in the genre, the horizons lie wide for the resourceful animation auteur.
A trail, in fact, has already been blazed. If you swear by Akira and Ghost in the Shell — or enjoyed the glitchy distortions of Love, Death & Robots — then wait for Ishan Shukla’s Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust.
A still from Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust
Set to premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) on January 28, Schirkoa took flight as an eponymous short film Shukla created in 2016. The 14-minute film, combining 3-D computer graphics with hand-drawn influences, won Best Animated Short at the Oscars-qualifying LA Shorts Fest. Later, he applied for and secured grants — from France, Germany and the U.S. — to develop it into a feature. Remarkably, Schirkoa is among the few animated feature films to be developed entirely on a game engine.
“I submitted the script for Epic Games’ Epic MegaGrant,” Shukla shares over a Zoom call. “They are the creators of Fortnite and Gears of War. Their Unreal Engine is one of the most successful game engines in the world. Unlike a traditional 3-D software from five years ago, game engines allow you to preview the results in real-time. This allowed me to experiment with diverse art styles while moving the camera around.”
Director Ishan Shukla
Shukla’s film draws on the best traditions of dystopian fiction. In a neon-lit megapolis — the titular ‘Schirkoa’ — citizens defer to an authoritarian 1984-like regime. Social barriers are rigid, predicated on the tenets of ‘Safety, Sanity, and Sanctity’, and immigration is discouraged. People wear bags over their heads to facilitate uniformity. The protagonist, much like the one in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, is a cog in the bureaucratic machine. There are murmurings of a war and an underground uprising.
Avoiding the trap of topicality
Shukla, a BITS Pilani dropout who worked for some years as a CG artist in Singapore, first conceived the world of Schirkoa as a graphic novel. The political turmoil of the last decade — Arab Spring, Syria, Trump, Iran, Hong Kong, Modi — inevitably fed into the project, though he was wary of falling into the trap of topicality. “I wanted to create something with lasting civilizational value,” says Shukla, who grew up reading Tolstoy and Kahlil Gibran. “The pushback against immigrants, for instance, is nothing new in human history. It’s been happening since the times the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens would have a fight because someone crossed over into their territory. I wanted people to relate to these themes irrespective of their culture, nationality or ethnicity.”
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust BTS
Though he’s happy to discuss Orwell or the Spider-Verse with equal zest, Shukla traces his primary influences to video games, not books or films. The iconic BioShock series opened his mind to dystopian world-building; games like Borderlands and Dishonored got his aesthetic juices flowing. “In Borderlands, they added these outlines to 3-D characters that made them look almost hand-drawn. It was a unique style when it first came out in 2010.”
Game animators also rely heavily on motion capture (mo-cap) for realistic movements and performances, something Shukla has experimented with on Schirkoa. “My father was a theatre artist and director, and I have assisted him on his stage plays. With mo-cap, I finally got the opportunity to direct real actors and feed that data onto the characters residing inside my animation.” The motion capture for the film was done over three weeks in Angoulême, France.
Behind the scenes of Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust
Storytelling with games
Ishan Shukla | Photo Credit: Sharad Varma
Visionary bent of mind
One of the first voice actors to come on board was poet-lyricist Piyush Mishra; it escalated from there to Gaspar Noé and French-singer songwriter Soko via Shekhar Kapur, Anurag Kashyap and Karan Johar. “We needed a voice for a flamboyant television host in Schirkoa. It had to be charming but also ironic, for a dystopia. It was unbelievable when Karan agreed to do it.”
Sneha Khanwalkar has composed the film’s score, one of her most expansive projects in recent years. “We worked with a lot of synth and jazz elements... I wanted this out-of-time quality to the soundscape. For the second half of the film, we used tracks by German psychedelic soul group King Khan and the Shrines.”
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust
Shukla works out of his studio in Vadodara, Gujarat. His company, Red Cigarette Media, is developing another adult-oriented animation feature in the sci-fi space. He collaborates frequently with Tehran-based illustrator and storyboard artist Shahab Serwaty; his character designer, Yaning Feng, is Chinese. Shukla says there’s no dearth of skilled animators and technicians in India; what’s lacking, perhaps, is a visionary bent of mind. “Animation in India is still sadly a service industry. There are very few indigenous creators who can write and produce animation films from scratch. Compared to a country like Chile, India’s indie animation scene is just not catching up. It’s all the more baffling because the technology is getting cheaper by the day.”
shilajit.mitra@thehindu.co.in
