In the acclaimed 2024 Malayalam horror film 'Bramayugam', I was captivated by the haunting flashback animation that reveals the origins of the eerie antagonist Kodumon Potti. Narrated by the manor’s cook, it recounts the rise and fall of a dark sorcerer ancestor who uses forbidden rituals to summon a chaathan, a goblin. While gaining dark powers through the spirit, it ultimately turns on the household and claims the estate. This backstory was brought vividly to life by the Kochi-based animation studio Eunoians (pronounced yoo-noy-ans).

“The director was very clear about what he wanted the audience to feel rather than just what they would see,” Seerow Unni, the creative director of Eunoians, recalls. He and his team travelled to the shoot location at Varikkassery Mana, walking through the corridors and the encircling forest to absorb the texture and atmosphere of the space.

In a similar way, Eunoians has been shaping other pieces of genre storytelling, from the expansive title intro and motion graphics work on the superhero film 'Lokah' to projects like 'Dies Irae', 'Chatha Pacha', each with its own distinct visual mood and language.

These projects prove that Indian animation can handle the heavy lifting of psychological horror and complex world-building. But this level of creative freedom is a recent luxury. For decades, pioneering animators operated in a major cultural blind spot, constantly battling the persistent myth that their entire filmmaking process was just a technical novelty for kids.

"Lamination"

When Suresh Eriyat joined the National Institute of Design in the early 1990s, he wanted to study film but was steered toward animation. Suresh heads Studio Eeksaurus in Mumbai, one of the country's most decorated independent animation studios. “I’m happy that it’s not an unknown space anymore,” he says. Back then, the medium was mostly unfamiliar. "A running joke went that a student would tell their family they were studying animation, only to be asked, 'Five years to study lamination?'"

"Animation can make you both weep and laugh," Suresh tells me. "The power of the medium is very underestimated in India." While shows like 'Chhota Bheem' have been successful, they have cemented the perception that animation is for children, he says.

Studio Eeksaurus’s work pushes back against that perception by treating animation as a fully cinematic, emotionally rich form. Their two National Award‑winning shorts make the case. 'Tokri', a stop‑motion film about a young girl trying to sell a basket at a traffic signal, won the National Award for Best Non‑Feature Animation Film in 2017.

There is also 'Kandittund!', directed by Adithi Krishnadas, built on unscripted recordings of Suresh's ninety-six-year-old father telling his old ghost stories. “People of that generation were so talented in the oral storytelling tradition,” he says. He wanted to preserve that for younger people. “Younger parents are no longer storytellers. They don’t have such a robust store of lived events that can be narrated in such an interesting way.”

Craft and “Shaadi Ka DJ”

Suresh had interned with Ram Mohan, who co-directed the landmark 1992 Indo-Japanese animation film 'Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama' with the Japanese filmmaker Yugo Sako. The Ramayana film was finished as a Japanese production because the Indian government withdrew partway through, on the grounds that the gods could not be turned into cartoons, which was seen as a children's medium. The same film is a favourite of Sumit Kumar, who heads Bakarmax Studios and admits to sometimes singing its songs at airports while waiting around. "Nowadays, the politics has sort of ruined it," he says.

Sumit Kumar is known as the cartoonist and graphic novelist whose work uses humour and satire to make modern Indian political history accessible through books like 'Kashmir Ki Kahani' and 'Amar Bari Tomar Bari Naxalbari'. "When people praise them, I say I did it for the money," he laughs. However, he got hooked once he started reading the history, "It's like you hire someone to be a wedding planner, but they get so deep into it that they're changing the groom."

The same biting humour also defines Bakarmax’s animation work, from the Simpsons-esque 'Aapki Poojita' and 'Bekar Bhawan' to 'Dalit Card'. When I ask Sumit about his research, he grins and says, “I guess you can tell by the serial killer vibe going on here”, pointing at the wall behind him, plastered with chits and notes, planning his next project.

"I like studying and then acting stupid, behaving as if I don't know," he tells me. For him, art needs to first "...fatten up, then cut down." He sees people advising against that approach. “People say, ‘No one sees so much detail. Just publish it, publish it.’” He disagrees. "It happens a lot in India. We see work that hasn't stood the test of time. And I wish those creators had done that one bit of research. Attention to detail really helps the work live slightly longer."

Sumit laments that writing is not respected in Indian animation. He jokes about Disney’s 'Tarzan', where an animator cannot let a character pick up an apple without turning it into a portfolio piece. "Of course, I'd give that guy a job. But you are not serving the film." The principle he and his collaborator Vivek have arrived at is that animation is filmmaking. "In any given scene, only one thing can be the hero: dialogue, character, camera, or sound. Else you’re like a shaadi ka DJ (wedding DJ), overloading people.” Suresh agrees, "In terms of technology, expertise, skill, I think we have a lot. But unfortunately, the storytelling part is where we need work".

DNAnimation

Seerow Unni of Eunoians grew up in Kerala, where television arrived late. His earliest visual education came through illustrated children's magazines such as Poombatta, the weekly Baalarama, Balamangalam, and Bobanum Moliyum. He recalls Kerala illustrators like Namboodiri and the cartoonist Yesudasan, the muralists and the paavakkoothu puppeteers, and a generation of Malayalam literary masters from Vaikom Muhammed Basheer to OV Vijayan. 

Tina, who runs Studio Kokaachi in Kochi with Pratik, cites Bobanum Moliyum as an influence too. She also grew up reading the Dinkan strips serialised in Baalarama, alongside Amar Chitra Katha. Their studio's title sequences and animation work for 'Lust Stories', 'Pippa', and 'Rocket Boys' have built a reputation for treating the opening of a film as a self-contained piece of storytelling, dense with research and a visual language of its own.

“With Thuramukham we did a lot of research," she recalls. Director Rajeev Ravi advised them to visit the maritime museum near Fort Kochi, where they dug through historical photographs of Lord Willingdon, Lord Curzon, and the formation of Willingdon Island, took their own reference images, and drew on an extensive visual archive compiled by his AD team.

“My influences are not really superhero stuff,” Tina says. Her current visual language draws from American indie comics such as Sandman, Saga, and Three Shadows, and especially the slice-of-life work of Ryan Andrews. The blend of these regional and global indie sensibilities can be felt in Kokaachi’s work.

Onwards Towards Original Storytelling

Amalendu Kaushik, co-founder of Studio Zeng, was taken to local art galleries from a very young age by his father, a fine artist, where he absorbed abstract paintings, sculptures, and visual art. "Growing up, I was shaped heavily by television animation, especially what was coming out of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in the late '90s and early 2000s," he says. Animated shows like 'Samurai Jack' taught him to prize cinematic pacing and bold negative space, while 'Batman Beyond' opened up a darker, emotionally denser palette.

Based in Guwahati, Assam, Studio Zeng is run by Vipul Barla, Rejath R, and Kaushik, who met at NID Ahmedabad and started the studio in 2019. Their animated project, 'Palestinian Dream', made in collaboration with the Netherlands-based Palestinian artist and filmmaker Dina Mimi, evokes a sense of haunting in a dystopian sci-fi space. They were also commissioned for a science museum installation mapping the journey of the Brahmaputra River, which became 'The Battle of Saraighat', a 3D project on a historical naval battle they had to research from the geography up.

"Earlier, the Indian animation industry was largely driven by outsourcing for the West", Amalendu tells me. "New Indian studios are trying to shift the narrative towards original storytelling”.

The Princess Mononoke Problem

In 'Miyazakiworld', Susan Napier documents the production of 'Princess Mononoke' as one of the most punishing in Studio Ghibli's history. The film was longer and more expensive than anything the studio had attempted, and Napier writes that it "induced a high level of stress and demanded almost superhuman efforts" from the entire staff, including Miyazaki himself. Several animators left the studio soon after. In India, where budgets are fragile and much of the industry still operates on service-work economics, how do studios manage talent and burnout?

"We motivate people to start making their own films, which we will support. Tomorrow, we would want ourselves to scale up as a team of many directors, rather than a team of animators," Suresh Eriyat says, describing how Studio Eeksaurus nurtures artists to take ownership and think like directors. Even when "mad deadlines and unreasonable people" arrive, the studio relies on its reputation to filter clients who already understand the value of the craft, screening out the low-value service work that usually grinds animators down.

Amalendu at Studio Zeng treats burnout as a management problem. "Animation is an inherently intensive and painstaking process, and there's no way around that," he says. "We've learned to accept that intensity is part of the medium, but burnout doesn't have to be." For him, this means matching people to roles instead of overloading generalists, scaling resources project by project, and refusing to stretch the same team across overlapping cycles. "Passion alone can't sustain a studio. If the system is broken, even the most motivated team will burn out."

Studio Kokaachi builds in buffer time and refuses to take on last-minute jobs. “Most production houses only realise they need a title sequence in the last month before release”, Tina mentions. They once faced an intense crunch on the Rocket Boys title sequence when both their lead artist and compositor contracted COVID‑19 mid‑production. So the studio declines projects where the client offers less than a month of turnaround.

To tackle these issues, Seerow Unni mentions that Eunoians runs parallel production. For instance, the production for 'Lokah' was split among teams handling motion-graphics teasers, title intro, end credits, backstory sequences, and a teaser for the next chapter, with a core team responsible for tonal consistency across all of them. "It reduced bottlenecks, prevented individuals from being overloaded," he says.

For his own intensely obsessive process, Sumit has found a balance over time, though he admits to a burnout earlier this year that he is still working through. "When you do something professionally, it means you're in for the marathon, not for a sprint," he says. He has also come to trust the interruptions. "Life will intrude into your work even if you don't ask for it. If you have to walk your dog, you have to. Life will claim its space and force you to relax."

Animation Industry Blues

"Indian animation is advertising. That's the start and end of it," Sumit says. "That's all it does. And once it makes enough money from it, it goes to film festivals and feels good about itself that it made a nice short film." He says that real revenue comes from commissioned commercial work, and the festival-circuit projects are funded out of that revenue. The reverse, where a film generates revenue and a studio sustains itself on its own output, is rare.

From an industry perspective, Suresh says Indian animation has been treated much like Indian IT, with studios providing low‑cost labour while “the blueprint and the design” are handled elsewhere. “We are seldom considered as storytellers,” he notes, arguing that only by cultivating strong domestic demand can Indian animators escape dependence on Western outsourcing. In the current service-based model, he feels Indian studios are too often reduced to executing a foreign client’s vision, rather than being supported as the true “architects” of their own stories.

With AI eroding India’s cost edge, Suresh insists on the irreplaceable value of human craft, “If you put a part of yourself into the work, that can be felt. And when automation happens, that is something people don’t feel.”

Artists using AI as a tool, the way they would use Photoshop, are not the problem, Tina believes. "But people who can't draw, when they try to use AI to replace the artist, that is where I think the problem is”. Clients increasingly arrive asking the studio to reduce budgets by using AI, or walk away to studios that will use AI to do the work for half the price. "That's something we cannot compete with”. She notes that the avalanche of low-quality AI slop is saturating people, and audiences will come back to human-made art. She also notes that the industry is finally moving away from mythology, after a decade in which mythological adaptations were almost all that the country's feature animation amounted to.

Seerow Unni notes that the historical lack of Indian animated feature films was driven by the assumption that a domestic market did not exist, but the recent box office success of international animated films proves otherwise. “It’s clear that there is a growing and viable audience, which makes the future of Indian animation far more promising."

If the audience is there, the question shifts from whether the medium has a future in India to how studios meet that future. For Sumit, since live action is so deeply ingrained in the country's viewing habits, animation has to fight to create cultural familiarity. The satirical sketches Bakarmax keeps producing are a kind of gym. That's where we exercise the muscle of stupidity, again and again," he quips. "How can we be more professionally stupid? How can we make it more fun? How can we tell a story better?" Whether the country is finally ready to take the medium seriously is the question the next decade will answer."

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