At first glance, the most striking aspect of Ishan Shukla's debut animation feature film, Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, would be the star voiceovers. These include acclaimed Indian and international film personalities such as Shekhar Kapur, Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Piyush Mishra, Golshifteh Farahani, Asia Argento, Lav Diaz, and Gasper Noe among others. But the most remarkable is the big leap forward that the film marks for Indian animation. The rich, intricate and scrupulously detailed sketches and illustrations don’t just energize the assorted characters but bring a whole uncommon, mythical world to life.
The nation of Schirkoa, the stuff of Shukla’s imagination, is a modern melting pot of eclectic nationalities, languages and cultures. However, it’s also a dystopian universe where the individuals have had to give up their faces and identities to become just a disciplined, mechanised mass of paper bag heads. To be alike is the only way of life. Imaginary enemies are created by the political system to distract the citizens and keep their discontent in check. Protests and pamphleteering, freedom, heterogeneity and multifariousness are disallowed for the sake of “safety, sanity and sanctity”.
It’s the bordering nation of Konthaqa, the forbidden refugee state, that makes way for some surreal imagery and cinematic rumination. It offers the fantastical, avant-garde alternative to Schirkoa, full of colour, music, dance, energy, and joy as well as sheer chaos and profligacy. It also makes the filmmaker posit significant questions of the other kind. You can fight suppression; the hope for a change can make the worst of oppression endurable. But what if you are haunted by your own freedom, feel burdened by it and want freedom from freedom itself?
Eventually, Schirkoa’s imagery is powered by strong political overtones as it deals with issues that are universally thorny, across the globe—those of immigration and exile, otherization, hatred and bigotry.
The Indo-French co-production had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) where it won the NETPAC (Network for Promotion of Asian Cinema) award. The jury noted in the citation that the film “bravely but not aggressively tackles the problems in current politics and in society, not only in Asia but worldwide”, adding that, “it is a film with a universal approach, done in a spectacular style with a clear vision, a lot of astonishing ideas and a great sense of humour”.
The film is based on Shukla’s own 2016 short Schirkoa played in more than 120 international film festivals, won over 30 awards and was on the long list of the Academy Awards. His studio Red Cigarette Media is focused on making animation films for adults.
Cinema Express spoke to Shukla on the eve of his film’s first-ever screening in IFFR. Excerpts:
Tell us about the origin story of the film. I am told that you first made it as a short and before that were developing it as a graphic novel.
I started my career in a small studio in Singapore where I worked as a designer, editor, animator, and everything. I took up that job specifically because I wanted to tackle every aspect of the process of filmmaking. That is where I learnt a lot of my skills. But, at the same time, I became bored of the everyday grind rather quickly. I had always been quite fascinated by animation. I had dropped out of engineering college in India just to take it up. But in just a few months I realized that, at the end of the day, it's just another job. I'm a button pusher on a keyboard in just another cubicle.
I used to scribble and draw a lot on my daily commute. Slowly I saw a pattern emerge. I was drawing a man with a box over his head every day. I was basically mimicking what I was seeing, becoming a replaceable person in this sea of people going to office every day. That was the inception of the protagonist called 197A, which was, in a way, my own reflection. I started working on the story, and began drawing and writing it together as a graphic novel. At some point, I also thought of designing it as an ambitious short film. I left the job, came back to India and took a sabbatical to work on the short film. I spent around four years making it. It did well, and I realized that it was a good time to start working on the feature film. The politics and themes of the graphic novel—I wanted to make sure that all of it, or at least most of it, got translated into the feature film. The short film could have just a small aspect of it. But it is very hard to get funding or support for an animation feature film. I met two of my producers at NFDC Film Bazaar in 2019. They understood what I was trying to do—the politics behind the imagery, the core themes. The gruelling but beautiful journey of making the feature film started from there and took around five to six years.
It would have involved intensive work within a closed room…
I really like working in a dark room all by myself. My wife keeps saying that we should go out more often, which I try to do. But the reason I came to animation is because I have always been socially awkward. Of course, it's also teamwork, you must interact with a lot of people. But even if I have a global team spread all over the world, I can still work with them through my own space, which is quite nice and cozy.
Where did most of the work get done?
The majority of the animation work happened in India, in my own studio. I’ve worked with two other partners. One is Platform Animation in Ghaziabad. It is a cool studio with very young and talented people. And then there was Debjyoti Saha’s 2D animation studio in Mumbai.
The second aspect of this film, sound design, and mixing, was done in France, as also a very important and technical part, which is called motion capture. Schirkoa is not cartoony animation. I wanted believable acting in it. So, we cast a lot of real actors from France through a casting agency and recorded their actions like a stage play. I directed them live, and whatever acting they’d do, be it the facial expressions or the body movements, got transferred onto the animated characters in the film. The acting in Schirkoa then is about real people, who are really emoting. It was the most rewarding part yet it’s also very challenging to get it right. That is the reason I did it in France.
To make the animation believable, it was extremely important to get the right people to act it out. The film is so conversational, it’s very theatrical, like a stage play. For me, it was important that the actors should do script reading sessions, and try to improvise, bring something of their own. That brought a lot of live-action filmmaking elements into this film.
When I was writing the script, I just let my horses run amok. I thought let me create my ultimate masterpiece. But when I put on my producer's hat, I began wondering if it was possible to pull it off because it was ambitious, technically. I am a very hands-on animator, I'm also quite technical when it comes to pulling things off. I realised I’d have to come up with something radical in terms of the techniques I was using. So, one of the first things I decided was to use a video game engine to create this film. This is something completely new, be it the US, Europe or India. It's not happening anywhere right now. I used a piece of software which is the upcoming big deal in the animation industry. It is called Unreal Engine. It is being used for creating a lot of popular video games like Fortnight. I used it to create a feature-length animation film. I also got a grant from the company because they thought it was a really good use of the software.
Unlike Disney Pixar, my filmmaking doesn't require thousands of computers. For me, it was very important that it doesn't cost me tens of millions of dollars. I had to think out of the box. I just required five systems basically to create the final imagery of this film. And it was also very environment friendly. We didn't have to run things for a very long time just for creating one or two frames.
I could create a living, breathing world. At the same time, it was time saving, money saving. And I think, technically, we achieved something cool.
The way you have captured the nighttime, the drone shots of the city. There’s such fine artistry to the animation…
For me that is one of the most important parts of the film. In which I’m lighting and colouring it in such a way that it looks like a painting. I was basically handling each frame by myself. I lit and cinematographed each of those shots and then passed them on to the animators for polishing. I would never let somebody else touch it. For me each frame was extremely important. I used to paint a lot in my college and school time. So, for me it was like painting with a camera. I would also change the storyboard to focus on something if it looked great, enhancing the mood and atmosphere. I would change the timing of the shots from day to night if it was aesthetically more pleasing. I also think that music enhances the film in a very cool way. I was working on the visuals as Sneha Khanwalkar was sending me the music. For me light and colour and sound is everything.
Talking of the global span of the film, it is not just in terms of the people involved but even in the setting, sound and imagery—the blue light area is so Amsterdam, the newspaper delivery is quintessentially Indian, there’s Pakistani truck art…
It was always intended to be a multicultural city. I thought that if I were to make a parallel world, which reflects our world, but not a particular country, or a society, what would it really look like? So, if you go to the subway in Schirkoa, the train announcements are happening in Japanese, there are people in the crowd who are speaking Bengali, singing in Iranian, a poet reciting in Tagalog, and there is Piyush Mishra speaking in Hindi. There is a random sprinkling of cultures and languages.
I am trying to talk about civilizations, humanity as a whole. When you go macro, then you can really talk about bigger things, you can go mythical. It was important that we talked about the rise of this mythical civilization of Schirkoa, in which there are cults, gods and politicians. which is nothing but a reflection of what is happening to the world right now. Something anyone anywhere can relate to.
And so, the eclectic voiceovers—from Karan Johar to Gasper Noe…
The intention was to get people from different races, cultures and languages. It was not supposed to be that star studded initially. I was trying to cast good actors, but not stars. I didn’t have that kind of a reach. For that I must really thank my producers—for getting me in touch with all these people, getting them on board. None of them said no. They all felt close to it.
The situation shown in the film permeates across the world—the post-truth world, the trust in lies, mind management, immigration, facelessness of people. How did politics align with the aesthetics?
I have been an avid writer since my early childhood, thanks to my father, who was a theatre artist, and my mother, who's also a writer. I was exposed to Chandamama and Amar Chitra Katha, but we had all kinds of books lurking in the house. Gorky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, you name it, we had it. I started reading Khalil Gibran when I was probably nine. It shaped me in a particular way. I used to follow my father to his rehearsals.70s and 80s were communist times. [As children] We saw the rise and fall of the Soviet era, and the rise and fall of the Jayaprakash Narayan era. When I started observing the world like an adult, the Arab Spring was happening. Xi Jinping became very powerful in China, Modiji came to India, then Trump came. There were also the crises in Yemen, Somalia, which nobody was really talking about. I was trying to see the world holistically, not just what was obvious. I wanted to create a world which could show the undercurrents. The faceless people in the film, it’s basically about how we are just becoming datasets. We may think we have individuality because we have an Instagram page but we're just a part of the data in a big server somewhere in Arizona. And it's going to be more blatant in the future. So, a lot of these things came into play when I was thinking about the politics because it's not just the politics of a country or a sect or a society, it's all coming from individuals, which basically brings cults, religion, political movements [in the picture] and the cyclical nature of their rise and fall.
The dystopian element is not traditionally associated with animation. It’s fun family films in the West, mythologicals in India…
There was this Canadian short animation called Bingo, which was basically about the psychology of a person who thinks he's not a clown. But, by the end movie, a clown convinces him that he is. That was a completely realistic film, there was no cartoony animation, no caricaturised characters. I saw it in 99 when I was still in school. It was something completely new for me, so I dug in. It was what fascinated me about the medium in the first place.
I was always into more mature animation; I was not really enticed by what is popular. It is all great. There is nothing wrong with it. But it's just a part of what the medium can achieve. Kids’ animation is so popular and makes so much money that the other forms don’t get their due. But it's changing. It has changed in Japan in a very big way. India is catching up now, because we have so many manga followers, manga readers, and anime aficionados. I think we will come out of the shell of just mythological to more philosophical films.
How was it catching the global spirit in music?
So, Sneha had done this TV series on MTV called Soundtrippin, in which she was basically creating music from mere sound effects, like a cycle bell. That was fascinating because I feel music and sound design always go hand in hand.
In Schirkoa it's the atmosphere, which really draws you in. It's not just one thing, the visuals, the colour, the camera or a song. It's everything.
With Sneha the decision was that we will define the two worlds—Schirkoa and Konthaqa—distinctly. We felt Schirkoa was a bit retro although we don't really point out which time it belongs to. We thought let's start with retro, then we tried jazz, then went to trip hop. And then we started mixing it with synth.
Sneha’s husband, filmmaker Kanu Behl, had written a song which Sneha sang to me one day and I decided it was the theme of Schirkoa. It's a very simple Hindi song which comes in the end credits, but it resonated with us so much that we thought this is the melody and we will play with the genres and synths around it. That became Schirkoa’s soundscape.
For the other world we tried to mix genres in a very big way. We started with folk, brought EDM, electronic dance music, and put some psychedelic jazz here and there. And then we started putting music from the voiceover artists themselves—King Khan, who is an Indian German musician. We jammed a lot, and he gave us two soundtracks, which we have used in the film, in which his own character is singing them in the film. Then there’s the track of Asia Argento where she's performing live. So, the second half of the film is like a compilation of different artists, but Sneha’s backbone is there everywhere. And then we wrapped it in the end with some of the poetry recitation by Lav Diaz and Piyush Mishra, keeping it all in harmony with Sneha’s melody.
She worked on the music for almost two years, and we had a lot of cool long sessions. I'm forever indebted to her for the time she gave to this movie. It is something rare in the industry. It's not just thinking about a song, getting some sort of brief from the director and delivering it the next day. She took her own time to create the scape, create the jamming sessions with her artists, and then find something. It was a very long process, but it was very rewarding because we were trying to find our music.
