IFFR 2024 | Animator Ishan Shukla: ‘Ramayana is much better than The Odyssey or Game of Thrones because it is so tragic’

Do you remember the very first animation film you saw?

It was probably on DD 1 channel on the television, Ek Titli Anek Titliyaan. The film that really brought me into this world was Canadian animator Chris Landreth’s short film Bingo. That film was cinema, it was theatre, an amalgamation of arts, not plain animation for me. Around 2000, I watched it on my computer. It was about the kind of psychological dystopia that we live in these days. It was not for kids.

Is it true that when you were six year’s old, the Ramayana saved you in school?

It’s very, very true. I never liked school. That was the time of Chandamama and Amar Chitra Katha. My father used to bring me comics, magazines, Nandan, Champak, Samrat, Balhans, so on, we read them all in our childhood. I was fascinated by these drawings, these epics. At a very early age, I started mimicking (on paper) whatever I saw. It was too complicated for me initially to understand…some of it was in Hindi, some in English. I thought I’d create a simplified version for myself. At age 6, I started making a comic based on the Ramayana. It took me three years to finish it, but every day, after school, I’d draw and write one-two pages of it, and by the age of 9, I finished around 150 page Ramayana myself. It’s still with me. My first epic which, in many ways, saved me from school.

Animation filmmaker Ishan Shukla. (Photo: Vinayak Sri/ASIFA India)

You’ve studied animation in Singapore, so, how many light years behind is India and South Asia from, say, Japan, which has a strong Manga and Anime culture?

I think most of South Asia, for decades, has been doing service work. That’s the sad part. We are not known for creating original stories and films that are known worldwide. But we are very, very good technical artists. Japan has the longest culture of comics after France, so we can never be in those shoes because the culture is way ahead of us in terms of comics. We did have our share of comics, but it’s not like in every house, we have a kid who is drawing their own comics. That is not happening here. But that is what Japanese culture, the Manga culture, is. Even when people are travelling in subways, they are drawing. We keep talking about market all the time when we talk about Indian animation, consuming is one thing, but how many people are actually creating here? We are still at the Chhota Bheem stage and it may not go away very soon because it has a good market, so everyone wants to create these easy YouTube videos which can earn millions of dollars for you. This kind of project (Schirkoa) has an audience but maybe not in this part of the world. People are getting there now, with greater exposure to anime and science fiction, but the creators are still scarce.

In a Ted Talk video, you mentioned American animator Ralph Bakshi’s quote changed your life. Which other animation filmmakers have inspired you?

I mentioned Chris Landreth’s short films, Bingo (1998) and Ryan (2004), both talking about important psychological things, in which people were going into depression, and Ryan, specifically, was a 10-minute documentary about this alcoholic, depressed animator, who, whenever he talks, his psychological demons come out from his head literally. Chris called it psycho realism, which is only possible in a medium like this. Now, of course, you can do VFX and live action, but why do that when you can do it in such a poetic way in animation? That completely blew my mind. If you have an idea which is so abstract, so big, so larger-than-life, which talks about everything, animation is the only medium that could actually do justice to it. Then I saw some films of Japanese director Satoshi Kon, whose films get inside the head of the characters. His film Paprika (2006) happens halfway inside people’s dreams, before Inception (2010), shared dreams happened in Paprika. That is how far ahead he was in his thinking. All these imaginative worlds were amazing. Apart from him, it would be Ralph Bakshi. But, honestly, most of my inspirations come from live action filmmakers like Federico Fellini or Alejandro Jodorowsky. Those people who really create absolutely shocking worlds and leave you in awe for two-three months after watching their films. Those are the kind of things I want to create, irrespective of animation.

Which Indian animation filmmaker have you heard of in recent times?

I’ve heard of this movie called Bombay Rose by Gitanjali Rao.

Ishan Shukla directing actors on the sets of Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust.

As an animator, do you see Artificial Intelligence as a threat or a boon?

It would be a bit controversial if I say it, but I feel it’s a boon. I can already see a lot of people’s job getting threatened in our industry as well. But I’d say it’s going to be a paradigm shift in the next 10 years or so in which the way artists and screenwriters are working will shift towards a certain direction and people will have to adapt a lot. Especially for creators like me who’s a Jack of all trades, it’s a huge boon because usually we need to generate ideas very quickly and test them on paper, Photoshop or a video to see if the idea is working or not. For that kind of thing, if you require a massive budget to just for the (idea) development, it’s very hard and becomes a long journey in getting the funding. That part I see becoming very easy, very quick with AI.

Behind the scenes working stills of Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust.

Can you explain how an arthouse animation differs from traditional animation?

So, this (Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust) is created in a 3D space, like in a three-dimensional software in which you can actually rotate the camera around. In traditional animation, we draw by hand, on paper, then we scan it, if you have to move the camera around there, it’s a completely different workflow and it takes a lot of man-hours. Here (arthouse animation), if we create a world, like this room right now and create a version of my puppet inside the software, it will live there. So, I can just make it act out something anytime, I can just shoot it. If that living world is there with me always, and if the character can keep acting, then it becomes like a live action film. For instance, in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), they did all these motion capture in which all the real actors went to a sound stage, they wore a suit and whatever acting they were doing, it was translated into the animated actors. That is exactly what we did in this film. We went to France and hired great stage actors, suited for the respective roles. They had to remember the script and we shot the whole film like a stage play, all 120 minutes of it.

When I came back to India, I basically had a stage play of the whole film in which there is no camera, people were just acting. I wanted real people acting in my film not just caricaturised animation in which we generally see a lot of people exaggerating emotions. The second aspect was the game engine itself, in which I could create a living, breathing world in which whenever I open the software, the cars will be moving, the rain will be there, the sunlight freeze going around, you will see the earth moving. That always gives chance to live action filmmaking. I just let the environment play out. So, that gives room for a lot of trials.

Third aspect is how painterly I wanted it to look because I want some slight outlines as you see in illustrations. I wanted the background as we go far from the camera and as things go out of focus, the kind of submerge which happens usually in watercolour paintings. In Pixar or Disney films, everything is so crisp and clean, I wanted something slightly dirty, smudgy, so that we have a feeling of a slightly surreal world. We have very cinematic angles, realistic acting, but the whole image is a smudgy watercolour painting.

You used Unreal Engine and Real-time iClone Unreal Pipeline to make the film. What are these?

Unreal Engine is a game engine used for creating video games, not movies, but in the last five-six years, the technology has sort of merged. Right now, the games are becoming very cinematic, and the movies are becoming more game-y. It is not just time-saving but also good environmentally. Creating a film like ours would take probably 600-700 computers running for months. That’s how (animation) movies are made. For us, it was just four-five computers. We saved tonnes of money, time, environmental waste. This technology is the future.

And the other (Real-time iClone Unreal Pipeline) is basically a software in which you can create characters for animation. They also gave me a grant like Unreal Engine because they thought this is a ground-breaking way of using these softwares which nobody has done before. The beauty of the software is that you don’t have to create a character from scratch. You can actually take a scan of somebody and input it into that software and then it will generate a character based on that body scan. You get a head start right away unlike in the traditional way, in which you have to create a character from scratch, which takes forever. A film like Schirkoa has hundreds of characters and I was short on manpower. I wanted to design each character myself. I used a lot of tools and there is some AI as well in that.

A still from Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust (2024)

Your characters are addressed by numbers: the hero is 197A and likes 242B and later he meets 33F and becomes 483F. The two respective pairings add up to a number each. What’s the logic behind these numbers as identity markers?

(Smiles) There are more such Easter eggs in the film, and more such characters, look for them in the crowds basically. If we live in a society in which people are just faceless citizens, the way they are named in Schirkoa is basically they are given a number and a title. So, if I am somebody who is higher up in the council of politics, I might be below 1,000, like 197A, 200A, 300A. If I am a little low in the strata, I will be above 5,000 and my grade will be B, C, D, like that, so, 197A is a higher elite citizen. Then there is 242B who is a little low on social ranks and there are people who are a little lower, and that is basically their social security number, their license plate number, their house number, everything is just one number. It’s standardised, it’s their Aadhaar card, which is their name in a way. But the idea is that that’s what we’re becoming and what we will be in the end if we keep going this way because there is no individuality left anymore. And I think numbers would be a perfect way to establish that.

You’ve said that 197A was your alter ego and, at one point, he left you. How long has that character lived with you?

So, 197A became an alter ego in early days of school because I thought I was in a prison, for eight hours per day, it was really very messy for me. I never really protested it too much because I knew I had to do this grind. But it became quite unbearable at some point because I had no idea what I was studying and I had no idea why am I doing this. There was this constant pressure of exams, and there weren’t much creative juices that I could find there. So then, I gave birth to this guy who’s very extreme, who’s burning things, killing people…it always starts with a monster. And then as I matured, 197A had matured, too, with me and he started saying things a bit more with what was behind them. So, a mature 197A said to me, it’s a waiting game, it’s a perseverance game, you’ll have to wait until the school is over and then you are your own person. Then I went to college and it again became a little bit of grind, 197-A grew his wings and flew away, he never looked back, he’s still in Konthaqa.

Do these two cities Schirkoa and Konthaqa symbolise the ‘so-called perfect’ developed world and ‘chaotic and colourful’ developing world?

It’s not the First World and Third World because that would be a simplistic way of seeing it. It is the extremities of oppression and freedom. The people who don’t abide by it, they have horns and wings and people who do, they have bags. But what is the end game here? How far will we go? That is really what I’m trying to explore. Can either of these worlds be really livable in realistic terms? We can keep crying about freedom but once we get a free country, who are the people running it? Is it going to the same circle again? Or we can fight for a very conservative society but once our children are there, will that world be really livable? Those are the questions that I wanted to ask in this and the only way I thought I could ask them is by giving two completely polar opposite worlds and see where will our character really stand: one country is so oppressive that you feel you can’t breathe there and the other is so free that you are like, what the heck is this?

There’s the making of a God in the story, a God that is gender-fluid, gender-diverse. Was it to be queer-inclusive?

Not really. I believe in archaeology and I feel there are too many gods, not just one, who’ve been misunderstood. I wrote it in 2015, and it was always about creating this person who is like (Hindu god) Shiva’s Ardhanareshwar (half man-half woman) form. I wanted that kind of thing. Somebody who is queer or drag queen, I didn’t want to go in that direction.

How did you manage to get a very interesting voice cast, from Asia Argento, Golshifteh Farahani, to Gaspar Noé, Lav Diaz to Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap, closer home, among many others?

The credit goes to all my producers. My French producer Bich-Quân Tran (of Paris-based Dissidenz Films), whom I met at NFDC Film Bazaar in 2019, which is when we started working on this (film). Bich-Quân brought Lav Diaz, Golshifteh Farahani, Soko (French singer-actor). She was very interested in the project because it was so multicultural, multilingual and we could cast anybody from anywhere. It was not restricted to one culture, one language, one ethnicity. Our German co-producer Stephan Holl brought in (Canadian musician) King Khan and Asia Argento for some voices. Our Indian co-producer Samir Sarkar got Shekhar Kapur and Anurag Kashyap who talked to Karan (Johar). Getting all these great people…that reinforced my belief in the film.

I wanted to use motion capture and wanted real actors to do this. The hard job for motion capture actors is that the voice is already locked. So, when they come in those stages, wearing the suits, they have to first listen to the voice acting and then act over it like it’s a song in a movie. You have to time their actions based on the timing of the voice.

The film for me is very special because it wasn’t created from scratch on a computer but is the work of real actors, real humans, who brought in their sensibilities and interpretations. A lot of that credit goes to Sneha as well for our music.

Indeed, the distinct music instantly places you in two contrasting worlds. What was your brief to composer Sneha Khanwalkar?

We definitely wanted to craft these two very distinct words. I wanted her to find one melody that could define Schirkoa. Gol Gol is wonderfully crafted, a bit melancholic, a bit monotonous. We tried a lot of synth music in Schirkoa, and there’s a lot of folk music, underground rock, trance music in Konthaqa. We also used some tracks from (Canadian musician) King Khan & the Shrines who’s voicing a character, too. Sneha took two years to create the music. I had found her in this MTV show called Sound Trippin’ and really wanted to bring her back to that world because that is where, for me, she really excelled and peaked. She would find music in things where there is no music. That was the beauty of Sound Trippin’. We tried all those things.

Director Ishan Shukla. (Photo: Sharad Varma)

To take you back to Ramayana, with Ram and Ramayana back in the majoritarian popular imagination, how, as an artist, do you approach the epics and what do you take from them?

Epics for me, as a kid, was all about fascination. They were very entertaining. It was not ethics, not religion, not spirituality, my fascination was for these godly characters and their epic battles. But as I grew up, I was more interested in the tragedy. How a character is driven by dharma but gets his family into shambles, and how it affects the people, that was very fascinating. It is much better than Odyssey or Game of Thrones any day because it is so tragic. We always see the good part of it and we all should by all means because that is why they are written. But look at how good the drama is. But, now, I look at the Ramayana as something from which my kids — I just became a father eight months back — can take good lessons from. Not the tragedy part of it because it can get very complicated, very quickly. Ethics part of it can be sometimes muddy…the kind of moral values we have today, it may not fit in. If we try to understand Ramayana from our perspective, it may not fit in.

In recent times, a lot of political documentaries from India which do well overseas find no platforms here. Where do you see the scope for political animation films in India?

In India, it could be tough, honestly, but adult-oriented animation is still a very early zone for them (the OTT platforms). If you see Japanese characters/anime, they (OTTs) would pick it because there is already a niche market for it but something like this (Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust) which is very global and talking about humanity not just some culture or language is a different thing altogether. We need one or two big films to come out that people can celebrate, then probably a window will open up for films like ours.