Not to go all film bro on you, but you probably haven't heard of 'Banyan Deer'. It has no merchandise, no plush toys, no pop-culture renaissance waiting in the wings. But in 1957, in a modest studio in Mumbai, a group of animators released India’s first colour animated film. For 15 minutes, a golden deer walked the line between folklore and future, between Ajanta and Anaheim, between what Indian animation was — and what it almost became.
The story is simple. A golden deer sacrifices himself to save a mother doe from a king’s hunt. The king, moved by the deer’s selflessness, renounces killing. It’s a tale from the 'Jataka', Buddhist moral fables passed down for generations. If it reminds you of 'Bambi', that’s no coincidence. Bambi’s fingerprints are all over this film. Quite literally.
Banyan Deer was made with a little help from Clair Weeks: a Disney veteran who’d spent sixteen years on Snow White, Bambi, and Peter Pan. Born in India to missionary parents, Weeks returned in 1956 at the request of the Films Division of India, a state-run institution trying to birth an animation industry from scratch. His job was to teach a group of young Indian artists how to make cartoons. He brought Disney’s house style, its sensibilities, and most crucially, its model sheets.
That tension — the Indian story in an American style — is the soul of Banyan Deer. And it’s what makes the film both historically vital and artistically complicated. Ram Mohan, who would later become the father of Indian animation, was among the students Weeks trained. Years later, he reflected that the film “...was supposed to be the representation of the Bodhisattva and instead ended up being the avatar of Bambi.”
Cinema is full of such imperfect births — works that carry within them the yearning of one culture, but the fingerprints of another. The film itself was a modest marvel. It was shot in Eastman colour and produced by a team of animators who had never done anything like this before. G.K. Gokhale, S.S. Varma, Ezra Mir are names that mean little to the average moviegoer today, but they fundamentally shaped this early moment.
What came after was India’s animation boom. Whether its the sheer number of Indian visual effects artists in Hollywood today or the larger rising tide of homegrown animation — none of it happens without this humble deer. Roger Ebert once said that no good movie is ever too long, and no bad movie is ever short enough. Banyan Deer is as short as a film can be, but it contains a long story — a story about what it means to animate a culture in motion.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
Rashmi, The World’s First Hindi Speaking Robot, Is Already A Victim Of The Patriarchy
A Homegrown Creator Has Engineered A Tamagotchi-Inspired Escape From Doomscrolling
Scientists Invent Underwater Robots To Help Predict Indian Monsoons Better