India’s Hidden Animation Story

Long before Mickey Mouse had a name, a leather puppet was already dancing on a lit cotton screen in an Andhra village. India’s animation story is older than cinema itself, and World Animation Day is a good day to tell it.

World Animation Day, also called International Animation Day, falls on 28 October. The International Animated Film Association (ASIFA) created it in 2002. It marks the day in 1892 when Émile Reynaud staged the first public show of projected moving images, his Théâtre Optique, at Paris’s Musée Grévin. The day is now observed in more than 50 countries, and India joins in through its studios, schools and festivals.

India’s first animators had no cameras. They had goat leather and lamplight. Tholu Bommalata, the shadow puppet tradition of Andhra Pradesh, is traced by scholars back to roughly the 3rd century BCE. Similar forms grew across the country: Togalu Gombeyatta in Karnataka, Ravanachhaya in Odisha, Tolpava Koothu in Kerala. Puppeteers brought the Ramayana and Mahabharata to life with jointed limbs and flickering light. Some historians believe this art travelled east and shaped Indonesia’s famous wayang.

In essence, this was storytelling through crafted motion, centuries before the film camera.

When cinema arrived, India’s first filmmaker played with its tricks too. Dadasaheb Phalke filmed the growth of a pea plant in 1912, one frame a day, an early time-lapse. Around 1915 he made Agkadyanchi Mouj (“Matchsticks’ Fun”), widely regarded as India’s first animated film. Sadly, it has not survived. Sources differ on exact dates, but all agree on the pioneer.

Then came a rapid run of firsts:

• 1934: The Pea Brothers by Gunamoy Banerjee reached theatres, and On a Moonlit Night became the first Indian animated film with a soundtrack.
• 1947: Cinema Kadhambam from Gemini Studios became South India’s first animated film.

The modern chapter began in 1956, when the Films Division in Bombay invited Clair Weeks, a Disney animator who had worked on Bambi, to train India’s first organised cartoon unit. The result was The Banyan Deer (1957), a Buddhist Jataka tale in colour.

Here lies a delicious irony. Weeks brought Disney’s Bambi model sheets to teach his students. Ram Mohan, one of the trainees, later admitted the Bodhisattva deer came out looking like Bambi. Yet that humble training room produced the pioneers of Indian animation. Ram Mohan, remembered as the “Father of Indian Animation,” worked for over 60 years until his passing in 2019.

Animation reached homes in 1986 with Ghayab Aaya, India’s first animated TV series. In 2000, Pandavas: The Five Warriors became the first animated feature made entirely by an Indian studio. Roadside Romeo (2008) was India’s first 3D animated feature.

Then Hyderabad’s Green Gold Animation turned a village hero into a national phenomenon. Chhota Bheem became a household name and later reached the world as Mighty Little Bheem on Netflix. The Legend of Hanuman proved that Indian epics can anchor global streaming hits. In October 2024, the Prime Minister himself cited Chhota Bheem on Mann Ki Baat while praising India’s animation revolution.

For decades, Indian studios were mostly outsourcing hubs, doing the heavy lifting for foreign IP. That is changing. Officials estimate the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (AVGC) sector at about $3 billion, with hopes of reaching $30 billion within four to five years. The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) is being built in Mumbai with partners like Google, Adobe and NVIDIA. Maharashtra’s 2025 AVGC-XR policy is reportedly backed by ₹3,268 crore. The challenge is talent: industry bodies flag a serious skills gap.

Look at India’s animation timeline and a pattern emerges. Every leap came when a strong story met an institution that backed it. Village puppeteers had the epics and patronage. Phalke had the camera and his own nerve. The Films Division had Weeks, funding and a mandate. Today, WAVES and IICT are the institutions, and Chhota Bheem and Hanuman are the proof that Indian stories travel.

Here is what we believe matters most now.

1. The shift from service to IP. For years, Indian studios earned by animating other people’s characters. The money and the cultural influence sit with whoever owns the character. Bheem, Krishna and Hanuman are the right kind of success, because they are Indian-owned.

2. Talent is the bottleneck, not ideas. We have the richest story library on earth. Industry bodies flag a skills gap. Institutes like IICT will only matter if they teach storytelling as seriously as software.

3. Our stories are still told mostly to children. The world’s best animation also speaks to adults, through documentary, satire and drama. That space is wide open for Indian voices, in every regional language.

India doesn’t need to catch up with the world’s animators. It needs to remember that it was animating shadows before most of them had screens, and then own what it creates.

Happy World Animation Day!