Wacky all the way: Animator Suresh Eriyat encapsulates profound ideas in humour

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru

Nilima Eriyat watches as a family of four dig through the ‘selfie frames' in various shades of brown the moment they walk into the exhibition hall. A one per cent brown is as pale as it can get, where brown becomes beige. A 90 per cent brown is probably what Naomi Campbell will choose to explain her skin tone. The family find their match in the range between 60 and 80 per cent and proceeds to click selfies with their faces framed in them. It is only then Nilima steps in, explaining to the family that the selfie-point is a wacky introduction to ‘What is Your Brown Number?', one of the animated shorts produced by Studio Eeksaurus. Nilima is the co-founder of the Mumbai-based studio.

The 2D animated satire, a graduate thesis of animation filmmaker Vinnie Ann Bose for National Institute of Design, is one of the films being shown at Bangalore International Centre till December 15. The first-ever retrospective of Studio Eeksaurus is part of 500-plus ‘Bengaluru Hubba' events. Films being featured include ‘Kandittundu', which won the 69th National Award for Animation Film, and ‘Tokri', a stop-motion masterpiece that also won the National Award in 2017. If ‘Kandittundu' brings to life six creatures from Malayalam folklore in black and white, hand-drawn animation, ‘Tokri' crafts in clay a traffic junction and street side shops in Mahim West of Mumbai, serving us a slice of life in claymation. As for ‘What is Your Brown Number?', in less than five minutes it cracks open the generational and cultural embedding that goes into India's obsession with “being fair”. And then there is the popular and yet another National Award (2015) winning ‘Fisherwomen and Tuk Tuk', a computer-generated animated short that adds more colour to the already exuberant hues of coastal Maharashtra.

‘Aranapuranam' spins off of ‘Kandittundu': this time, the magic of Malayalam folklore gets a colourful twist as it props up the humble red-tailed skink into a mythological beast. ‘The Seed', another claymation, which stops short of two minutes, in essence is what Studio Eeksaurus is all about – potentials being nurtured for years until they bear fruit. Whether one spends 10 minutes or one hour at the ‘Eeksaurus Revealed: Behind the Animated Curtain', one cannot ignore the years of effort that go into making these short films. Just as the films serve complex and profound ideas batter fried in humour, the exhibition unpacks Studio Eeksaurus in funny bits and pieces, each nugget a wealth of information. For instance, the music in ‘The Seed' was inspired by a traditional Malayalam chant ‘hailaysa', used by labourers to synchronise their efforts while doing heavy manual labour.