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Indian Rhapsody Gitanjali Rao, the writer/director/designer of the acclaimed new feature Bombay Rose, shares some of the details of her creative journey. Gitanjali Rao’s exquisitely crafted debut feature Bombay Rose is hailed as one of the year’s most inspired, original and colorful animated offerings. The hand-painted feature, which reportedly took about six years to complete, is infused with the sights and sounds of Mumbai and chronicles three very different tales of the heart. After making a splash at the Cannes, Venice and Toronto festivals earlier this year, Bombay Rose will premiere on Netflix this month. We had the chance to speak with Rao, who wrote, designed, edited and directed this feature. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation:
out of the U.K., had also come on board. The pre-production process took 18 months. Pre-production in animation is very specific, and is about making a dummy film, really — bringing together the screenplay, the animatic (the animated storyboard), the design and look and feel of the characters, the colors and concepts, the scratch voices. The rough cut of the film becomes its blueprint. This blueprint can often take longer than the production itself. Once this was done, I approached Mumbai-based Paperboat Animation Studios to make the entire production of this frame-by-frame painted film!
Animag: First of all, big congratulations on the release of your wonderful feature. Can you tell us a little about the development history of Bombay Rose? Gitanjali Rao: I had an idea for a film six years ago. It was a different one, and I didn’t find the finances for it. Girgit was about three migrants to Mumbai, and was six months into production before being abandoned. I took one idea from that to make the short film, TrueLoveStory, which was shown at Cannes in 2014. I also took some ideas from another unfinished film, Shadows of the Mahabharata, especially the folk art style. In 2016, I found the French producers Les Films d’Ici and they decided to support the film. By 2017, Cinestaan, an Indian film company based
How did you come up with the folkloric, distinctive and highly original animation style and designs of the movie? In Bombay Rose, since I had the luxury of a long format, my characters move seamlessly into their dream worlds from reality. I use different art styles that I have been drawn to and inspired by, but essentially belong to the character’s place of origin and culture, to enable them to escape into their dream or what might have been a reality ages ago. The film has four styles that seamlessly merge into each other. The reality is constructed in an impressionistic style, characteristic of my earlier short film TrueLoveStory. But within that, I go into the mindscape of my protagonist Kamala, who hails from Madhya
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Pradesh, using the Kangra miniature painting style. For Salim, the hero of the film who hails from Kashmir and is a truck driver’s son, I used the truck-art style of Pakistan. The other important character in the film is an Anglo-Indian woman who used to be an ‘extra’ dancer in Hindi films from the 1950s, so for her my style changes into the black and white vintage style of an older Bombay. What were your biggest sources of inspiration for the movie? I have often traveled across Bombay as a student, then when working at different studios … in buses, trains, autos and taxis. Traffic congestion would ensure one spent hours and hours in these travels. In those days before smartphones, one looked out of the windows to see life spilling out of the streets. Even today, I feel Bombay is a city that (as a dweller) passes you by more than you live in it. I would see young girls and boys selling flowers and flirting and wonder how they express their love coming from different states, speaking different languages with only Bollywood as their reference to express love. Somewhere in these travels within Bombay and outside in the rest of India, I found the story of my protagonists Kamala and Salim. In a city which they literally build, clean and construct, they have no citizenship and are vulnerajanuary 21
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