The bhooter raja grants four boons instead of three, the fantasy kingdoms look oriental and the music is a blend of folk, classical and Bollywood, but Goopy and Bagha still save the day.
The musicians immortalised on the printed page by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury and on celluloid by his grandson Satyajit Ray are set to make an animated comeback in Hindi.
Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya, a 2013 production of the Children's Film Society, India, (CFSI), is scheduled for release across the country in March.
The film, which will be screened with English subtitles, is part of an attempt to make animated versions of Indian classics to reach a larger number of youngsters. Next in line is an animated version of Sukumar Ray's HaJaBaRaLa.
The 79-minute Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya is directed by Shilpa Ranade, an animator and a professor at IIT Bombay. She took three years to complete the project.
"I have grown up watching Goopy Gyen Bagha Byen. I also studied its illustrations before starting work but ultimately I created my own characters," said Ranade, who drew inspiration from her work as a book illustrator.
So though Shundi and Halla remain in Ranade's adaptation, some quirks of the characters and their adventures are the animator's own creation.
"The tongue-in-cheek dialogues and the final interpretation have been touched up keeping a larger audience in mind," said Ranade.
There are eight songs in the animated film against the 10 in the original, which released in 1969. Most of them are inspired by folk and classical pieces and one by an old Bollywood song. The band 3 Brothers and a Violin has scored the music.
"I am keen to see how my animated version is received by the Calcutta audience, especially the kids," said Ranade.
Filmmaker and Satyajit’s son Sandip Ray, who has not seen the new film, said the audience might be difficult to please. “The effort sounds good but it is not easy to turn Ray into an animation. It requires a lot of time and budget constraints often come in the way. Thanks to TV and the Internet, children are exposed to very high-quality graphics and home attempts often fall short of expectations,” he said.
Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya was first screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013. After receiving accolades internationally, it was screened, as an experiment, for schoolchildren in Mumbai last year.
There are around 257 films in the CFSI library, including those by Shyam Benegal and other renowned filmmakers. But none has been released in theatres. Shravan Kumar, the chief executive officer of CFSI, was in the city on December 29 and 30 to “scout for local creative talent” for the HaJaBaRaLa project.
