Animator Ishan Shukla: 'Ramayana is much better than Odyssey or Game of Thrones any day because…'

Vadodara-based animator Ishan Shukla has now dabbled with the art of filmmaking, and his animation film Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust had its world premiere on January 28 at the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Bright Future category. Talking about the same in an interview with Money Control, the animator and filmmaker also shed light on his school days and the influence of Ramayana on him. He revealed, “I never liked school. That was the time of Chandamama and Amar Chitra Katha. My father used to bring me comics, magazines, Nandan, Champak, Samrat, Balhans, so on, we read them all in our childhood. I was fascinated by these drawings, these epics. At a very early age, I started mimicking (on paper) whatever I saw. It was too complicated for me initially to understand…some of it was in Hindi, some in English.” He added, “At age 6, I started making a comic based on the Ramayana. It took me three years to finish it, but every day, after school, I’d draw and write one-two pages of it, and by the age of 9, I finished around 150 page Ramayana myself. It’s still with me. My first epic which, in many ways, saved me from school.” ‘ Ramayana better than Game of Thrones’ Shukla opined, “It is much better than Odyssey or Game of Thrones any day because it is so tragic. We always see the good part of it and we all should by all means because that is why they are written. But look at how good the drama is. But, now, I look at the Ramayana as something from which my kids — I just became a father eight months back — can take good lessons from. Not the tragedy part of it because it can get very complicated, very quickly. Ethics part of it can be sometimes muddy…the kind of moral values we have today, it may not fit in. If we try to understand Ramayana from our perspective, it may not fit in.”