Scenes from the film Bhagmati-The Queen of Fortunes

Mumbai, July 19: The film features Tabu, Milind Soman and Hema Malini — and their toons — and is coming shortly to a theatre near you.

Bollywood’s first serious toon movie, not merely for kids but for the mainstream Hindi film audience, is ready to see the light of the day.

Based on a love story that is part folklore and part history and titled Bhagmati-The Queen of Fortunes, the film has been produced by Zee TV and has more than half of its reel hours in animated form.

The film is slated to be released commercially within two months across all theatres — and abroad, too, as the English subtitle suggests.

“I wanted to introduce animation to Hindi feature films,” says Ashok Kaul, the director of the film. “This is the first time that about one-and-a-half hours of a mainstream Hindi film will be animated. It is something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, except that it is a fully swadeshi venture,” adds Kaul, who collaborated closely with Raj Kapoor on several projects and directed the film Param Vir Chakra.

Zee did not want to divulge the cost, but said it was a “big budget” film. Given the expenses involved in animation, the project cost several crores more than if it had been entirely live action.

The plot is based on the legend of Bhagmati and has been adapted to Bollywood conventions, including rebirth.

Bhagmati, says Kaul, was a beautiful Hindu girl and a devotee of Shiva, whom Quli Qutb Shah, the prince of the kingdom later to be known as Hyderabad, fell in love with at first sight. Trials and tribulations later — which included the 17th century prince swimming across Moussi river on a stormy night to meet his beloved —the lovers married and lived happily ever after, only to be reincarnated in an animation studio in Bollywood.

“I was invited to speak at the New York University, where I was asked why even though India produced 1,000 films annually, there was not one animated film in the mainstream. I said we are going to make one,” says Kaul.

“I also decided it would be something that would not replicate what the West had done. I looked at many stories and found the legend of Bhagmati. I was also attracted to the character of Quli Qutb Shah, who was poet, a lover, an architect — as he is said to have built Hyderabad — and a secular man,” he says.

In the film, Tabu plays a contemporary young woman who visits the places that the lovers haunted, only to realise that she and her boyfriend (Soman) were Bhagmati and her prince in a previous life. Cut to the past, and to animation — where Tabu’s toon plays Bhagmati and Soman’s toon plays the prince. “It is live-cum-animation,” says Kaul.

“There are times when the screen is fully animated or fully live. There are times when the two are mixed,” he says.

“The toons are in 2D and the backgrounds are a combination of 2D and 3D,” says Rajiv Sangari, director, animation division, Padmalaya Telefilms, which is owned by Zee.

The shooting took place at the actual locales in Andhra Pradesh, including Golconda Fort — and the animation was processed entirely at Zica, the Zee Institute of Creative Arts, which Sangari heads.

“It was painstaking work. About 120 people worked on the film, It took us one-and-a-half years to complete the animated parts,” says Sangari.

Indian audiences have started to get fillips of animation as Bollywood masala. In the recently released Hum Tum, animated characters of Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukherjee are used to show the passage of time.

Kaul wrote the screenplay and the dialogue, while the music is by Vishal Bharadwaj, with one song by Ravindra Jain.

But isn’t resting a film heavily on animation a little risky for the Indian market? “I wanted to do an intense love story. The film is by India, of India and hopefully for the entire world,” is all Kaul will say.