A scene from The Lion King, a classic in 2D animation

Imagine doing the sketches for The Lion King right here in Calcutta. Or creating the background for a Jungle Book.

The war of the eyeballs may be on with new channels added to kids’ fare on the small screen, but the moolah is with backroom jobs from Hollywood studios. And a city animation school is setting its eyes on launching a production house of its own to capture a piece of the outsourced pie.

Explains Deven Shah of The Academy of Animation Arts & Technology (AAAT), which started classes last November in Hazra: “A lot of manpower is required to create 2D or classical animation. It takes 100 men about 30 days to create 20 minutes of content. Usually a series comprises 20 episodes. So it makes sense to employ many people to work simultaneously.”

According to Shah’s estimate, India will require more than 5,000 animators next year.

By 2005, AAAT plans to be ready with a studio. “There are about 15 studios in the south and the west, but none here. The awareness is low though there is so much talent here,” says Ranjini Mukherjee, AAAT business head.

The animation school conducted workshops for children before it started off. “We did not expect conversions at that age but we needed to make those cartoon buffs understand that knowing a software is not being an animator. One has to deal with pencil and paper, and have a sense of anatomy, colour and perspective,” Shah points out.

This is what beginners start out with at AAAT. The first step towards creating a Mickey Mouse is drawing a circle.

As they continue with the one-year course, they have to do time-sketching, in which the number of sketches they can produce in a given time is recorded.

The students also have to take classes in mime, sculpture, drama and story-writing. “We have a screening test. If we feel that a person is not fit, we discourage him or her,” states Mukherjee.

It is a busy classroom with heads bent on the lightbox. But the student-teacher ratio is a mere 9:1. “We follow the model of Sheridan College, Canada (arguably the best place to learn animation),” she adds.

The budding animators range from a Higher Secondary student to a housewife, who came to admit her son and enrolled herself. Among them is Anshu Arya, a young graduate from Loreto College. “I left my job as visualiser in an e-card company. This is the best thing to have happened to me,” she said, turning back to her sketch in a hurry.