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All animated about the future
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Manu Ittina dreams big for a 25-year-old. The animator, who has made his mark in Hollywood, is now dreaming of turning India into a destination for original animation
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PHOTO: MURALI KUMAR K.
ENTHUSIASM UNLIMITED Manu Ittina: `Every Indian has an artistic streak in him. We have an artistic outlook to our life'
You seen Marty the zebra making an announcement on the shell-microphone? Or Alex the lion making faces as he chokes and spits out grass he ate, in the animation film Madagascar? Then think Bangalore boy. It may be a jungle out there in Hollywood's animation land, but Manu Ittina, at 25, is the Mowgli of this domain.
Young, ambitious, learning and experimenting, this animator is back in his hometown with big plans of setting up an animation school, a studio, and a film production company.
Manu grew up just like all of us, watching Tom and Jerry on TV and worshipping Jungle Book and its characters. But he never really understood what it would take to make such a film. So when the runaway hit Toy Story came along, Manu, who was 17, was totally blown away by the mind-boggling animation. Slogging away at his computer science P.U. course, he decided he won't ever be able to forgive himself if he didn't study animation. He must be feeling good now, having worked on superhits such as Madagascar and Shrek-2. MetroPlus catches up with this young Turk over a cuppa at Royal Orchid Central at Manipal Centre.
Microscopic numbers
"As Indians we don't have much of an animation vocabulary," says Manu. Even today, though there is a perception that a lot of Indians are tucked away in Hollywood's studios, he says most of them are in the technical sections. "The community of character animators is still microscopic."
And it is this thought that brings Manu back from the lucre and lure of Hollywood. "I really love animation and want India to be a destination of original and indigenous animated work, not just outsourcing. Outsourcing is a sign of short-sightedness."
He claims he couldn't really draw or paint much through his childhood. But he learnt. "Every Indian has an artistic streak in him. We have an artistic outlook to our life — it's in our culture. But it has been put on the backburner. I want people to look at a different point of view — it's not all about code writing," he says, taking a jab at the city's overflow of techies.
Manu wanted to do drawn animation — the traditional 2-D character animation that is now considered the "classic" form. It made it easier for him to later take to computer graphic or CG animation. "The computer is Satan. It seduces you and lies to you a lot. It says, `C'mon use me'," laughs Manu. Making a character entertaining in 2-D animation is very difficult, he says. But animation has to thank computers. It's turned it around totally, admits Manu. "The story is the prime essential. The computer adds the freshness to the look and amplifies the effects by a few factors."
"Animators, though, are lazy people. They always want to simplify. But that itself is a hard process," he says. The perception that computers make an animator's work easier is definitely wrong, insists Manu. That's the dichotomy of technology for you.
Of course, animation itself is no cakewalk. Only if there is an input of hours of drawing and its accompanied tasks does one get to see all the "fun" on-screen. "It takes 50 guys a year and more just to do animation," explains Manu. It all begins with deciding the camera angles, placing stick figures, modelling the background, adding texture and paint, doing the surfaces so they look real, making character's eyes dart in the right way, putting emotions into the characters and finally someone has to light it up. Phew! Despite the build-up Manu gives, you're left laughing when he says that at leading studios such as PDI/DreamWorks, if an animator produces three to five seconds of animation a week, it's considered good work. It takes a good four years to make an animation feature film.
Manu earlier went through the rigours of training at the School of Visual Arts, New York, Sheridan College (Canada) and the Academy of Art in San Francisco to obtain his BFA in animation. During his student days he got an opportunity to work on videogames inspired by The Lord of the Rings series, and on the films X-Men, Louis and Clark and The Majestic. He landed work as a character animator with PDI/DreamWorks Studios where he got to work on the two blockbuster films.
His challenges in the making of the two movies sound quite interesting. He had the arduous task of doing a complicated break-dance sequence for a bunch of pigs in Shrek-2. And in Madagascar keeping up with the energy levels of the characters, starting everything anew (Shrek-2 had a prequel) and creating unbelievable exaggerations wasn't easy.
Bringing down biggies
The animation school he plans to set up will have instructors from the U.S. — fellow animators who worked with him in the studio and are willing to come here because they believe India has potential. "In existing animation schools, you tend to learn the software rather than the art," says the young man seriously. Ask him — he went to one in Bangalore and says he had to "unlearn" what was taught here. So his school will be based on a portfolio evaluation system — a student will get to learn the next phase only if the instructor feels he's "ready" for it. Manu is currently working on a multi-lingual, non-animated feature film he doesn't yet want to talk about.
Manu can be contacted at mittina@hotmail.com.
BHUMIKA K.
This column features those who choose to veer off the beaten track.
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