India's Animation Film Studio Delights The World

In this series, Sramana Mitra shares chapters from her book Vision India 2020, that outlines 45 interesting ideas for start-up companies with the potential to become billion-dollar enterprises. These articles are written as business fiction, as if we’re in 2020, reflecting back on building these businesses over the previous decade. We hope to spark ideas for building successful start-ups of your own.

I have always been fascinated by Pixar. The Incredibles enthralled me. Ratatouille mesmerized me. And apparently I am not alone: The former, with a production budget of $92 million, grossed $631 million worldwide; the latter, with a production budget of $150 million, grossed $621 million. So much for cartoons as child’s play.

The answer to how such numbers were reached boils down to enchanting characterization, tight, moving screenplays, superb graphics, and outstanding editing. It was only a matter of time before I started looking for ways to apply this formula to an India-based studio, working with Indian stories, colors, and culture. Disney had tried oriental stories earlier, with Mulan and Aladdin. However, the treatment in those movies remained distinctly American. I was after something much more Indian.

Now, to achieve the Pixar benchmarks in graphic excellence, we needed advanced technology combined with screenwriting and editing finesse. The latter two were relatively lower barriers to entry, skills abundantly available in Hollywood. Innovative technology, however, could be a formidable differentiation, especially if we were able to reduce the exorbitant cost of animation filmmaking. With this basic analysis in hand, we set up Elixar Studios in 2008. The mission of our venture: To make high quality films based on Indian mythology and culture, while rewriting the economics of animation filmmaking through technological innovation.

We put together a board of directors early on with people who understood our vision and were able to connect the right dots. Dominique had worked with Steve Jobs and Greg Brandeau (CTO of Pixar) at NeXT. Greg and Dominique became the first two board members of Elixar, and they immediately brought on John Lasseter, one of the founders of Pixar and director of studio hits like Toy Story. They then brought on Brad Bird, the two-time Academy Award-winning director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille. With such a rich and varied group of mentors to guide the project, we were able to gain funding through Disney’s venture capital arm, Steamboat Ventures. Disney would distribute all our films, as they did with Pixar.

We started with technology. For two years, our team of top-notch computer scientists worked in Silicon Valley to build new 3-D computer animation software. With multi-core computing making headway, the software was optimized with inherent parallelism to run at previously unknown speeds. The technology was also capable of an unprecedented level of automation. Characters walked, ran, swam, flew, somersaulted, threw javelins, or wielded swords and tridents with software commands and hardware rendering, and without much human intervention. What took 15 hours to do with previous generations of animation technologies could now be done in 15 minutes – offering our creatives more latitude for experimentation, while simultaneously shrinking the time required to make a film.

We patented every angle of the technology and had no intention of selling it as a tool. We were going to use our own technology to make our own movies. But first we would need a creative director a? la Lasseter. For this, John nominated one of his prote?ge?s from Pixar, Rini Chaudhury, who studied at his alma mater, the California College of Arts (CCA), and had worked under him on Cars and Wall-E. She was raised in the US, but her family was of Indian origin, so she knew many of the stories and was fascinated by such mythical characters as the polyandrous princess, Draupadi, and the skull-garland sporting goddess, Kali.

We set up two centers for our animation teams: one in Ahmedabad, close to the

National Institute of Design, and the other in Shantiniketan, affiliated with Viswabharati University. A month after the Viswabharati center opened, I went back to check on the progress, and I found one animator after another glued to their screens, their eyes intent, unaware of my presence.

“Are they playing online games?” I asked their manager. “They look so focused, so addicted.”

The manager, a transplant from Pixar’s Emeryville studio, smiled and gestured to me. “Come, let me show you.”

I followed him to a workstation where we watched a young man create the entire battle scene of Durga versus Mahishashura in front of our eyes.

“Impossible,” I said aloud.

“Not anymore.”

No other animation studio in India, or abroad, had access to our technology, so word spread through the animation community that Elixar was the company to work for. In Internet message boards, animators were chatting about Elixar’s miracle, itching to get their hands on it. But the only way to do so – work for us. We started getting resumes from CCA, Rhode Island School of Design, NYU’s Tisch, and numerous other prestigious art schools. All the applicants were clamoring to play with our software, even if it meant moving to India.

I tried to suppress my smile, but it was hard not to have fun with the turn of events. American animators wanting to move to a small town in India? This might be fodder enough for a film itself.

In 2008, as we started work on the technology, we had also started working on our first story, Kali. We had to assemble a team of storytellers who knew how to write fast- moving yet sensitive scripts with complex characters. I had attended Robert McKee’s Story Seminar in which McKee offered an in-depth analysis and framework for storytelling. Almost every successful screenwriter in Hollywood, from Lasseter to Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), had taken the course. I agreed in principle with McKee’s emphasis on story over spectacle, and we structured Elixar according to that philosophy.

We created story teams of experienced Hollywood screenwriters paired with Indian writers who knew the local texture, culture, and heritage. Brad brought in Tom McCarthy, who had worked on the Up script, to provide overall guidance from our advisory board. We also recruited Sabrina Dhawan, best known for writing Mira Nair’s widely acclaimed Monsoon Wedding. Sabrina, at the time, was teaching at NYU’s Tisch School, and she helped us recruit many of our screenwriters over the years. While she and I wrote Kali, we trained a team of screenwriters who would become our long-term screenwriting team.

Over the last 10 years, this team has written 10 spectacular features. Five of them were based on the Mahabharat. Three more on other Indian epics and mythology (Ramayan, Bhagavat, and the Devi-Puranas). The ninth was based on Abanindranath Thakur’s Raj Kahini, set in Rajasthan. And the tenth an adaptation of Shirshendu Mukherji’s children’s ghost story, Gnoshai Baganer Bhut, but superimposed onto the Indian cricket scene.

All films were done in English, for international audiences. Our Mahabharat scripts turned out to be a nail-biting political-thriller franchise that quickly amassed its own Harry Potter-like following. In Kali, we juxtaposed the gods versus demons battles of the Devi Puranas with a distinct humanization of the mythical characters.

Our production budget per film was an unbelievable $25 million, while each film, each year since 2011, has grossed an average of $250 million. But not only have they been lucrative, three out of the 10 have won Oscars for best animated feature film, securing for Elixar a brand that these days, automatically draws a global audience.

Pixar finally has a competitor.

Today, we have turned our attention towards Europe, China, Japan, and the US, where we hope to develop films with local talent, weaving local stories. Our Italian studio is already deep into a Julius Caesar script, as well as one on Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. In Paris, we have a team working on the story of Napoleon’s first love, Desire?e, who went on to become the queen of Sweden. And in Athens, an effort is underway to give life to Homer’s Odyssey, as well as Helen of Troy, who like Elixar itself, launched a thousand ships.

Photo credit:  Fred Miller/Flickr.com.