Gitanjali Rao: Charting a sure path in animation

In a society that is fascinated by Bollywood, Gitanjali Rao has chosen to tread a road less taken. An award winning animation filmmaker, Rao chooses mundane subjects and breathes life into them through her animations.

The visual storyteller creates adult-oriented animation films, which are inspired by day to day lives of people and their struggles. Two among them – ‘The Printed Rainbow’ and ‘Orange’ – have won her several international awards.

In fact, ‘Printed Rainbow’ that describes the loneliness of an old woman and her cat, who escape into the fantastical world of matchbox covers, premiered at Cannes 2006 and went on to win three awards in the Best Short film category. It was also shortlisted for the Academy Awards in 2008, besides winning 25 International Awards and traveling to over a 100 international festivals.

She painted the entire film frame by frame over three years as a labour of love dedicated to her mother. In 2002, she made her first short animation film, ‘Orange’.

An interesting component of her films is the absence of dialogues. None of the characters in her films speak and she restricts them to just visuals. There is brilliant use of background scores, though. “For me, storytelling is like a painting. I like to move the paintings and visually tell a story. But if the subject of a painting starts talking, it could kill people’s imagination and interest. Hence, I have chosen not to add any dialogue in my movie and keep an element of mystery,” says Rao, who also has several acclaimed animated commercials to her credit.

As far as subjects are concerned, the filmmaker says she has always been fascinated by people who migrate to bigger States to eke out a living. “This class of people have many stories to tell, but no filmmaker cares to listen to them or show their stories. My stories have always been inspired by them,” she says. Her last movie ‘True Love Story’ is a frame by frame painted 2D-animation 19-minute film about love between two migrants who come to Mumbai and fall in love with each other.

“The hero of the film is hugely influenced by Bollywood and he falls in love with the girl across the street. This film is a boy-meets-girl story from the perspective of people who find themselves adrift in a big city,” explains Rao, who is the first Indian animation film director to have been invited on the Kodak Discovery Award jury.

She feels the animation industry is in a nascent stage in India when compared to Bollywood and the West. “There are animators who are doing their individual kind of animation; many trying to make films which never see the light of the day due to financial constraints,” says Rao, who has crowd funded her projects like ‘Printed Rainbow’. She feels crowd funding is the best way to take the Indian animation industry forward as no distributor or producer is willing to invest in animation films today.

The 1994 graduate in Bachelor of Fine Arts from JJ Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai learnt the basics of animation from veteran animator, Ram Mohan. Since then, she has been producing, directing and animating films independently.

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