The youngest participant, all of eight, at the animation workshop. Picture by Aranya Sen

They slog away diligently on their light-boxes and line testers. As a pig, drawn on paper by one of them, comes alive and jumps up on a computer screen, there is a collective cheer, applauding another animation success.

The cheer comes not from expert animators at work in their studio, but from a group of kid animators between ages eight and 14, fulfiling some of their fantasies.

On Saturday, the four-day Children’s Animation Workshop came to an end at the recently-inaugurated Toonz Webel Academy — jointly set up by Webel and Toonz Animation India.

The workshop, with eight talented kids and their bright ideas, has been an annual Toonz event since 2001, but was held for the first time this year in Bengal.

“There were about a thousand applications,” said Rekha Menon of Toonz, who helped conduct the workshop.

“A panel of animation experts went through the entries over two weeks and made a final selection of the eight best,” she explained.

The children were asked to send in their story ideas accompanied by rough character sketches.

The eight chosen stories deal with varied topics, including eco-friendly superheroes (12-year-old Sumit Sen’s Green Man) and classics reinterpreted (eight-year old Nehal Bihani’s Foolish Fox).

The rough sketches and story outlines were given shape at the workshop, with a little help from experts and animation veterans. “But the children were involved in every step of the creation,” asserted Menon.

And the young animation enthusiasts loved every moment. “It’s fantastic,” squealed one, who happily missed three days of school for the toon treat. “Much more fun than being in school,” she admitted. Even the duration of seven hours every day drew no complaints. The three-minute shorts based on the children’s stories would follow different animation styles. “Depending on which style suits the story best, we may use cut-out, claymation and even 3-D,” Menon added.

Though the workshop ended on Saturday, the excitement for the lucky eight is far from over. By November, their animation films would be ready for festivals (including the International Film Festival) and aired on Cartoon Network, which currently beams Toonz’ Tenali Rama.

Once the shorts are ready, Toonz would also start looking for distributors for marketing the films internationally. Going by past responses, this lot of films is sure to earn kudos for the company as well. “Torty’s Day Out, one of the films emerging from the 2001 animation workshop, continues to win awards even today,” concluded Menon.