Monday, July 11, 2011

Nepali Animation

Several firsts.

Alarmed by Bollywood training its lenses on the Buddha, Tulsi Ghimire is now making the first Buddha film from the Himalayan republic to bolster its claim to the founder of Buddhism. ...

“Gautam Buddha”, to be dubbed in English, Hindi, Sinhalese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and German, is going to be an animated film and the first animated feature film from Nepal.

“It would have cost far less had I chosen people to play the roles,” he says ruefully. “But I found that impossible. ..."

There haven't been a lot of animated features centering on the founders of major world religions. Christianity has Veggie Tales, but the Life of Christ mostly gets the live-action treatment.

The founder of Islam is off-limits, and has been for some time. (Who wants to go on a hit list?)

And India, where most Hindus live, hasn't taken much to animation of any stripe, religious or otherwise.

So we'll see how a long animated movie about the Buddha performs, box-office wise.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The founder of Islam is off-limits, and has been for some time. (Who wants to go on a hit list?)

Didn't RichCrest do "Muhammad: The Last Prophet" in 2004 as a feature-length animated film?

rufus said...

Well, Mohammad and Moses both killed,pillaged and raped whole villages and towns. I can see how THAT would make for an interesting film...


rufus!

Chris Sobieniak said...

Yeah Richard Rich did make a Muhammad film indeed. His though was a little keeping in accordance to the faith by not showing the character at all, you only see the people who are around him or affected by his actions or something like that, I haven't seen it myself, but it's out there.

For India, there was an animated feature based on the Hindu epic "Ramayana", though that film was co-produced with a Japanese producer and mostly animated there.

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