India’s in-demand animators ready to draw their own crowds
Large revenue gains give long-time Disney collaborators confidence to strike out on their own
They call themselves Hollywood’s best-kept secret: India’s animators, long-time partners with the likes of Walt Disney, are reaping the rewards of surging demand for visual effects and gaining the confidence to venture out on their own.
India’s animation industry generated revenue worth 44.9 billion rupees (HK$5.3 billion) in 2014, a 13 per cent increase from the previous year, according to data from a FICCI-KPMG report on India’s media and entertainment industry.
The industry is expected to double in size to 95.5 billion rupees within five years, as Hollywood studios tap a large pool of low-cost, English-speaking animators who are familiar with Western culture.
So far, animators based in India have created crowd scenes and props for the Emmy award-winning TV series Game of Thrones as well as more prominent visual effects for films including Disney’s 2014 movie Maleficent and Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon, among other Hollywood hits.
"We are one of those best kept secrets. We do all this amazing work and no one knows about it," says Biren Ghose, who runs the Indian subsidiary of US firm Technicolor, which includes the India-based animation units that worked on Maleficent.
