“Sri Aurobindo: A New Dawn”, a just-premiered short film that encapsulates the life of a visionary who inspired millions as nationalist, poet, philosopher and yogi, also breaks new ground in its choice of animation as story-telling format.
The animation film, which premiered for a select audience at the Alliance Francaise on Monday, and was globally launched on YouTube on Independence Day, marked one of the high points of Sri Aurobindo’s birth anniversary celebrations that took place in Auroville with prayers and the traditional dawnfire, and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram which observed Darshan Day.
The film, primarily targeted at youth and in a medium they resonate with, is a project of the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS) and made by Mumbai-based animation studio Eeksaurus.
Touching upon the inflection points of Sri Aurobindo’s life and distilling the essence of his quest for higher consciousness and vision for mankind in an under half-hour visual experience, the film shines a light an under-emphasised, if not completely buried, chapter of India’s reawakening when Sri Aurobindo foresaw that humankind was heading towards an evolutionary crisis and India had the key to the spiritual evolution of humankind.
It portrays Sri Aurobindo’s role in India’s renaissance and his work for its freedom as a first step towards a still greater freedom that awaits humanity. With his spiritual collaborator Mirra Alfassa, or The Mother, he forged a new path called Integral Yoga, synthesising all the yogic traditions of India and going beyond.
Among the top collaborators for the project were Resul Pookutty, Oscar awardee sound engineer, Victor Banerjee, Padma Bhushan awardee, Deepti Naval, actress and writer-director and Shri Sriram, British multi-instrumentalist while Suresh Eriyat led the team of animators at Studio Eeksaurus.
A large collective of well-wishers and institutions also lent a helping hand to the project.
Pradeep Narang, chairman, SAS, noted that a lot of love and devotion has gone into the making of the film as an offering to Sri Aurobindo.
As Priti, part of the core team behind the project, said though the animation clocks a mere 28 minutes of run-time, it took over two-and-a-half years of intense efforts to complete the production.
The final cut is a reflection of the extensive research that went into developing a unique art style for the film. The film strings together more than 20,000 frames with each frame 2D hand drawn by a team of acclaimed artists.
The creators have also adopted symbolic realism to encapsulate the larger events in an innovative way. Illustrating this point further, Shivakumar, project lead, pointed to the aptness of a quote of The Mother, on the necessity to seek out newer forms of expression. As she said: “New words are needed to express new ideas, new forms are necessary to manifest new forces.”
And, this film for the youth, who especially are much more open to evolving formats such as animation, also features striking quotes from Sri Aurobindo, who held that “our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit”.
The animation concludes with his call to all those who are young at heart to join the adventure of consciousness with him: “We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future”.
