India Animated: Essays on Contemporary Practice

This book explores Indian animation, a sector in rapid transition. Major studios have built international reputations through outsourcing and co-production, while smaller studios and independent filmmakers increasingly create original content for TV, streaming platforms and festivals. Alongside these visible transformations in the industry, artisanal and ethnographic animation have also flourished. India Animated: Essays on Contemporary Practice examines key ways in which practices and preoccupations in India are shifting. Distinctive postcolonial approaches are the focus of this volume, which foregrounds the inventive animation works of filmmakers in recent decades. Substantial essays consider the conception, production and marketing of animated works, alongside a selection of interviews that provide a vivid, granular sense of creative processes. Indian animation remains largely overlooked in both public discourse and scholarly research. This volume addresses that absence by examining the region’s pluriform practices and their broader implications for animation studies.

Timothy Jones is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Director of the Academic Media Center at Robert Morris University, USA. His work on animation, education, and industry appears in journals such as Animation Practice, Process & Production, Animation Studies and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as in the edited collections Reconceptualizing Film Policies (2018) and Animation and Advertising (2019). Tim contributes regularly to Animation Studies 2.0, and co-hosts the podcast Spirited Animation.

Anitha Balachandran is a filmmaker, researcher and adjunct professor of animation at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, India. Her work engages with visual culture, media history, and the intersections of illustration, image-making, and animation within transcultural contexts. Anitha’s writing has been published in the Journal of Illustration, Imago: Studi di cinema e media, Animation Practice, Process & Production, Animation Studies 2.0, and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies.