Ram Mohan: Animation GURU

Ram Mohan recently completed 50 years of involvement with the Indian animation industry. He is credited with teaching and training a whole generation of modern animators in India. A science graduate, Mohan began his career in 1956, when he joined the governmental Film Division, then in the process of developing an animation unit.

For the most part, he was self-taught and early on, adopted the Disney style. In 1968, he joined Prasad Studio, a live-action feature film company in Madras that had invested in animation and needed someone to do the hands-on work. He started Ram Mohan Biographics in 1972 and later took over Graphiti.

Asia Image: When did you first decide to become an animator? Can you tell us more about your background?

Ram Mohan: Honestly, I had never thought of taking up a career in animation. My hobby was cartooning. I used to love to draw cartoons. There was no career available in animation at that time. There were just a handful of people who were doing animation on their own by trial and error, by reading books.

All that changed in 1956, when under the U.S technical aids programme, Films Division received an animation camera. A Disney animator, Clair H Weeks, also arrived as part of the programme to train some people and set up a proper animation studio.

Since I had some interest in cartooning and always loved animation, I thought I would meet this gentleman from Disney. Of course, I had no hopes of getting in because I was not qualified as an animator. But when I showed my cartoons to Weeks he liked them and asked me to join the training programme.

Suddenly I found myself in the Films Division programme. It was a chance for me to enter animation as a career. Some time later, I received an offer to head the Prasad Productions Animation Department at Film Centre in Tardeo, Mumbai. They had acquired an Oxberry animation stand - a sophisticated rostrum camera – and set up a special effects department in animation.

We started off with films like ‘Baap Re Baap’ and we did a film called ‘You Said It’ on how democracy functions. We also did a series called ’Down To Earth’ which won several awards. One of the first features which used animation, ‘Bhuvan Shome’ was also done here. Because Prasad Productions was in the Films Center and producers used to come there to get their films developed and processed. They also had access to our department and asked us to do animation for their title sequences and it was fun doing it.

Satyajit Ray came in and wanted animation for his classic ‘Shatranj Ke Khiladi’. There was a scene in the introductory passage where he wanted to show the political situation in India at the time when Vajid Ali Shah was the ruler. It was very nice working with Ray because he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted the whole group of Britishers in the style called ‘Company Drawing’.

AI: How did you start on your own?

RM: I decided to set up my own company called Ram Mohan Biographics in 1972. Bhimsain who had left Films Division at the same time as I did, also joined me and we did a film called ‘Harmony’ which was done with cutouts (cutout animation), moving them under the camera.

We did some animation sequences for films like ‘Hasina Man Jayegi’, ‘Do aur Do Paanch’, ’Biwi O Biwi’ and songs sequences for films like B.R. Chopra’s ‘Pati Patni aur Woh’ and Hrishikesh Mukherji’s ‘Khubsurat’ where the animation was like the moon coming down and fish flying, some fanciful things.

We got a lot of work in advertising i.e. commercials. From 1972 to 1997, when I finally closed down Ram Mohan Biographics, we hardly grew from 10-15 people to about 20-25 in the span of 25 years. People were reluctant to come into animation as a profession because they thought there was no challenge in it and it was a very small field.

Suddenly in the mid-nineties, there was interest in doing contract work and work outsourced from abroad. I was approached by Ronnie Screwalla from UTV to join hands. I thought that it was a good idea because I found that at the end of 25 years, I had reached some kind of dead-end. There was no scope of growing any further because we didn’t have the infrastructure to grow any larger. I thought it was fine and so we set up what was initially called ‘RM-USL’ and later it was named ‘UTV Toons’.

Ronnie and I went to Los Angeles where we visited most of the studios there, including Disney and Fox. We showed them some commercials I had made at Ram Mohan Biographics. That was pretty good, because they were for commercials that required high quality of work.

The first job that we got was the story of ‘Oliver Twist’ where Oliver was a little dog and all the other characters were also animals. It was interesting to work on those episodes. But then we realised that we did not have enough animators.

We had a core group of 25 people but that was not enough for continuous outsourced work. We needed a much larger set up. The only way to expand was to train more people because there was no other way to get people with the required skills. Thus, along with our production programme we also set up a training programme.

One thing what I wanted to do was to explore animation further. So I decided to switch from classical animation to 3D and took over as chairman of this company - Graphiti. We trained people who were already doing hand drawn classical animation, giving them basic and strong training in how to handle Maya 3D software.

AI: where do CGI and classical animation merge? If they merge are there conflicts?

RM: They are merging quite a bit. Look at the films that have been done both for Disney and Dreamworks. In Disney’s ‘Treasure Planet’ you can see that environments are created in 3D, characters are animated in 2D or you can animate a 3D character to look like 2D and blend it with painted background. So there are now two things coming together in many ways i.e. 2D and 3D. For example, hand drawn and hand painted images blended with computer-generated imagery

are rendered to look similar and so on.

Therefore I think a stage will come in future when it will be difficult to differentiate between CGI i.e. Computer Generated Imagery and Classical hand-drawn animation. Just as today so much of 3D is blended into live action in such a way that you can’t make out which is live and which 3D as in the film ‘Lord of the Rings’. So all of them are coming together in a composite way.

AI: Apart from classical work, what are the experimental works that you have done?

RM: Experimental work has been done more in the sense of design than testing. I don’t know if it is a good or bad thing but I have always had access to the best equipment for cell animation. When I was in Films Division they had an Axme camera then there was Oxberry. Then when I went to Prasad Productions, Oxberry was right there for me to use.

So I never had to think about the innovation of some other technique to develop. Usually these are done when you have a challenge. Like you have to make films with rigged up cameras, then you have to start working with materials. But we never had that problem so we stuck to classical animation using cells and paints. And we had no problem getting imported materials like good cells and colours and so on. So in that respect I think all the cells are kind of textures one can get, that we have tried.

AI: How did the ‘Meena’ series unfold and did ‘Sara’ evolve from this?

RM: The UNICEF organisation in Bangladesh was working on social problems in the country. Their chief, Roche Carnegie had visited India and wanted to make films based on social issues and problems faced in the country. The main issue in Bangladesh was ‘gender equality’ - the distinction between a girl child and a boy child born in the same family.

Girls were ill-treated, not being sent to school and not fed enough healthy food. So when Carnegie was in India in 1992, she approached me to make animation films on these issues. I was with my own company RMB with a staff of 10 to 15 artists. I immediately agreed and started to create characters for Meena and her family like her brother, parents and her parrot Meetoo, etc. I had limited staff and not enough infrastructure. So I joined hands with Fil-Cartoons Manila and did the animation series for Meena, which became very successful.

We did a series of 14 episodes for Meena films. Eventually Meena became so popular that there is not a single person in Bangladesh who doesn’t know Meena. But there was not enough funds with Fil-Cartoons to continue with the series. So I decided to complete the rest of the Meena series using other means like Flash, for example. Flash as a software has its own intricacies and limitations. But when used in different ways, it helps to create beautiful results.

At the same time I was introduced to UNICEF South Africa which was also facing issues like teenage girl problems. So I designed ‘Sara’ for the South African country. Sara dealt with problems of adolescent girls in South Africa.

AI: How does if feel to have trained a whole generation of animators in India?

RM: I have students all over the country like in Bangalore, Bombay, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Hyderabad. And they are now training new students while some are teaching in institutes, others working in studios. It feels nice to have created the third generation of animation in India and hope it will grow and expand forever.

AI: What do you foresee for the future of animation in India?

RM: There is a lot of potential for the growth of animation in India. Basically there should be awareness and people should think differently. The ‘cartoon’ image of animation should be removed from their minds. Like the countries in the west, animation is done at different levels - for children and for adults. Likewise it should be in India. There is lot of potential for original content but unfortunately the infrastructure is missing. Whereas countries like China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia have overtaken India in this field. Moreover children in the west read lots of comic books, which is not the practise in India. That has to be encouraged. Thus animation culture has to be practiced and developed in India.

AI: What is your insight about animation?

RM: One reason why animation is useful in India is that when you have animated characters they become sort of generalised. You take a live character, he belongs to a particular region. He is either from Kerala or a Bengali or a Punjabi. They are associated with one particular region and lifestyle. In animation, the character is neutral. Therefore he becomes an Indian farmer or an Indian fisherman so animation can unite the entire country.