Jan 18, 2024

Indian Animation, VFX, and Video Games to Star This Weekend at Animela Festival in Mumbai

Billed as India's first international festival for animation, VFX, XR, video games and comics, Animela will be held this weekend in Mumbai.

This multimedia event was developed to highlight creative and technical advances in the field of animation and visual arts.Animela is not just an annual gathering, but a series of smaller events throughout the year that allow professionals, students, and enthusiasts to engage with the animation industry. small-scale events throughout the year to enable them to engage with the industry.

Animela2024 will open with "Sultana's Dream" by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Elguera, followed by a Q&A session between Elguera and Spanish and Indian crews, including Indian animation expert Upamanyu Bhattacharya. Much of the film was developed in India and won four awards at last year's San Sebastian International Film Festival. The film won four awards at last year's San Sebastián International Film Festival and has been nominated for two Spanish Academy Goya Awards this year.

According to festival director Kireet Khurana,

India is making content on par with international standards, but lacks a global content creator narrative With Animela, we are helping the Indian government's Create- In-India and intend to build a platform with an international pedigree that aims to introduce and promote the best films, games, and other visual arts produced by independent Indian talent and studios to a wider audience internationally. At the same time, it will provide a comprehensive artistic and technical examination of the AVGC space by bringing together global industry veterans and up-and-coming Indian talent under one roof.

Here are five highlights from this year's Animela program.

Perhaps one of the most exciting things about international animation events is seeing the work of local artists whose work might otherwise be buried in a sea of titles at other national events. In this family-friendly sidebar, we present 18 short films from the past two years by promising Indian creators:

India's "RRR" took the world by storm in 2022, and one of the film's VFX supervisors, Srinivas Mohan, was at this year's will be at Animela to talk about his work on the film. Mohan is a 25 VFX veteran who has worked on groundbreaking Indian feature films such as "Baahubali: The Beginning" and "Endhiran". Shobu Yarlagadda, co-founder and CEO of Arka Mediaworks, will also be in attendance to discuss his company's work on "Vedam," "Maryada Ramanna," the mega-hit "Baahubali," etc. [Animela will host a traveling edition of Annecy's MIFA Campus, where five local artists or artist teams will participate in an intensive four-day workshop with mentors from Annecy. Following the workshop, each participant will present their project at the Animela - IMC Pitch event, where attendees will be among the first to see the most exciting local projects currently in development. These projects will also be presented to international buyers, producers, and distributors at the India Pitch Session in Annecy in June. This year's participants include animator Pari Satarkar, filmmaker Krishna Chandran, director Isha Mangalmurti, writer-director duo Dhruv Sehgal and Debjyoti Saha, film director Rituparna Sarkar and her designer Sruti Menon. [17] [18] While Animela's primary focus is to promote local animation, another goal of the festival is to introduce world animation to India. To that end, organizers have curated a selection of short and feature films from around the world that will be screened at this year's event. Slide, directed by Bill Plympton; The Peasants, directed by DK and Hugh Welchman; The Pharaoh, The Savage and The Princess, directed by Moshel Ocelot; The Concierge, the feature debut of Yoshimi Itazu, Unicorn Wars, directed by Alberto Vazquez; and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, directed by Pierre Ferdes.

In the world of short film distribution, few agencies do comparable work to French producer and distributor Mille. For this year's Academy Awards, the agency distributed five of the 15 animated shorts. The company's co-founder, Luce Grojan, will be in Mumbai to talk about her experience as a short film distributor and how the Miyu team has spread awareness about short film animation distribution worldwide.

Animela is founded and run by the Aniverse and Visual Arts Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to pursuing artistic and public goals and improving the audiovisual environment in India. It is supported by a partnership between the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, and the Annecy International Animation Festival.