The Animated Cartoon Film in India by Kantilal Rathod

In India, the [sic] film as an art form has rarely come up to the level of our traditional graphic, literary and dramatic arts in expressing human emotions and probing the depths of the human mind.

We have achieved maturity in the various arts, especially in the graphic art, and it is surprising that we have not made any conscientious effort to utilize this maturity in films, A direct form of the graphic art is the animated cartoon film which has a most fascinating technique, but we have failed to adopt it to any appreciable extent. Ever since we started making films in India about fifty years ago, we have been producing only “live-action” films. But our complete reliance on “live-action” bespeaks a brankruptcy [sic] of new ideas and a lack of courage to experiment in new forms, so essential for any art to remain fresh, alive and interesting. 

What is the technique of the “animated” film in which the artist’s drawings are brought to life? To grasp this, we must know the first principles of motion-pictures. An art form, no matter how fantastic it may seem, is not magic, it is a blend of craftsmanship and imagination, based on aesthetic and scientific principles.

The animated film, like the live-action film is based on the principle of “persistence of vision.” The eye—the retina, to be extract—holds an image for 1/10th of a second after the object has passed from sight. This is called "persistence of vision." How does it apply to the motion-picture?

A strip of motion-picture film consisting of 1440 still photographs, called "frames," takes a screening time of one minute when projected at a speed of 24 frames per second. Each still photo, or frame, is exposed and projected on the screen at a speed of 1/24th of a second. Thanks to its ability to hold an image for 1/10th of a second, the retina sees all the separate images on the screen in a continuous flow.
 

In a live-action film, there are still photos of live objects, whereas the animated film consists of photos of drawings. The artist prepares hundreds of drawings in desired actions and order. For instance, if he wants to show a man sneezing for one second, he makes 24 drawings and photographs them in order. When projected on the screen at the rate of 24 frames per second, the desired action takes place. The artist-animator plays the tune and the inanimate drawings dance to it.

It is interesting to note that as early as the 1880's, when the very first films were being made by the Melies brothers in France and Edison in the U.S.A., men like Emile Reynaud and Emile Cohl in France produced hand-drawn cartoon films which immediately became great successes. Today their names are all but forgotten, but their pioneering efforts have produced remarkable results.

Some of the prominent names in the field of animated films in Europe and America are: Winsor McCay, Walt Disney and the United Producers of America (U.S.A.); Norman McLaren (Canada); Len Lye, and Halas and Bachelor (England); Robert Wiene (Germany) and Trnka (Czechoslovakia). Their films have made us laugh with their comic episodes, cry at tragic events, wonder at the world of natural beauty and made us conscious of political and social problems.

Although humour is the key-note of most of the animated cartoon films, their creators have also successfully tackled and depicted complex subjects and emotions. Apart from being a medium of entertainment, the animated film has also been effectively used for educational and advertising purposes.

But this wonderful form of film has been sadly neglected, particularly in India, by the makers of entertainment films. We are the third largest film-producing country in the world, and this is no mean achievement, quantitatively. But we have not accepted the animated film. There seem to be two reasons for this. Firstly, lack of finance coupled with scant interest and faith in the film as an art. To us film-making has always meant a business undertaking. The live-action films have a market, so why bother about the other form, especially when it is so different and troublesome! Besides, the entertainment-hungry millions of India enjoy any motion picture thrust upon them.

Secondly, the situation would have been different if our graphic art had been creative, but it has not been so in the last one hundred years at least. It is only since Independence that a mild form of revolution has taken place, and our artists have become sensitive to creative work. This has influenced the various fields related to the graphic art, and the animated film is certainly one of them.