Mumbai: The popularity of animated content around the world isn’t new. However, in India, the animated shows or movies are still considered as mere cartoons, inspite of the growing viewership of anime among the youth. In an effort to break this misconception, Inspire Films has recently collaborated with Lotpot Comics to produce live action series of popular characters like Motu Patlu, Sheikh Chilli, Sampat Champat, Kaka Shree and Natkhat Neetu for television as well as OTT.
Indiantelevision.com caught up with Inspire Films’ founder and managing director Yash Patnaik to further delve deeper into the topic.
Founded in 2007, Inspire Films is a subsidiary of Beyond Dreams Entertainment. The company has produced over 10,000 hours of content (45 originals) for Indian OTT platforms and broadcasters like Star Plus, Hotstar, MX Player, Pogo, Disney, among others.
Lotpot is a bilingual comic magazine published by Mayapuri Group created by late A.P Bajaj. Lotpot was first published in 1969, issue came out in the same year and has been published without a break since then. Popular characters of Lotpot Comics “Motu Patlu” have a 3D animated show successfully running since the last 11 years on Nickelodeon India TV Channel and still continues entertaining kids with its rib tickling content. Motu-Patlu are the only Indian kids character whose wax statues are placed at Madame Tussauds, India. Lotpot has been entertaining the readers and audiences for more than 55 years and still running high.
Edited Excerpts:
On the launch of Inspire Films, despite the presence of Beyond Dreams Entertainment as an established production house creating content for GEC and OTT platforms
We started with Beyond Dreams in 2007 as a media company. Media is a very vast space so we have been producing content for almost 17 years. Now Inspire will only focus on content and since 2010-11 Inspire has been producing all the content.Beyond Dreams is a holding company and Inspire is Beyond Dream’s company. Beyond Dreams will have some other areas of interest in business and the idea is to segregate as we don’t want to deliver any confusing messages to the world.
There will be some non content business also which we would be doing and those will be under Beyond Dreams and Inspire will focus on the content. In the last one year we have produced seven shows which were of 60:40 ratio for television and OTT. We have produced four tv shows and three web series. Inspire will continue producing content for TV and OTT.
On Inspire Films’ venture into a light hearted family comedy genre
I think the characters motu and patlu have been exciting for me for years and even before they took the animation avatar. I felt that these are amazing characters to be adapted into live action and they are realistic and fun. They have certain messages to carry and are relatable. I think the trailer was made to be told as a TV daily series with a light hearted message driven content.
On the market for animated content other than tv and if animated content garner enough eyeballs across age groups
We are doing live action animation or comic characters. I will not be the right person to answer on the animation thing.
On choosing Lotpot over other bestselling Hindi comics in a saturated market
If you look at both TV and OTT, we are all looking at books and characters because it has been tested with so many but Lotpot is a 50 year old property. Three generations have grown up reading, watching Lotpot characters and hence it is very natural for the characters to now come in live action for the first time in 50 years.
On the potential of simple stories conveyed in comic style through shows like Motu Patlu
The demographics of television audiences have changed. We have a more mature audience for television than what it used to be. If you look at the shows that are working, the audience profile is 25 plus and Motu Patlu fits perfectly in that audience profile. There are women and men who are 35-40 plus have read and seen Motu Patlu.
On Inspire Films’ plan to enter the commercial films
Not immediately and our focus is going to be on television and OTT for the time being. If some great idea comes and one would like to explore, one will. They say never say never. We will definitely reveal it very soon. Allow us a couple of months.
Leave a Reply