Bangalore: Three days after the big happening in the corporate cinema world — the $ 7.5 billion takeover by Disney of its biggest rival in animation, Pixar — analysts are looking for logic in the coming together of these Hollywood `biggies'... and finding it in new outsourcing outposts of the business in places like India.

With animation increasingly dependent on Computer Graphics Imagery (CGI), traditional studios like Disney, which pioneered the old-style frame-by-frame handcrafted animation film with classics such as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" nearly 70 years ago, are losing their competitive edge.

Pixar, which George Lucas of Star Wars fame founded — then sold in 1986 for $ 10 million to Steve Jobs, iconic head of Apple Computers — has blazed the new technology-driven animation trail with products like "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo."

In the past, the two studios cooperated in making and marketing a few highly praised animated features, but soon realised that this industry could support one `500 pound gorilla,' but not two. New 3-D animation and digital editing tools like "Maya", and "FinalCut Pro" run on personal computers — and can be deployed just as well (and a lot more cheaply) in Mumbai and Manila, as in Burbank, California, which has seen many independent film makers harnessing the outsourced route to produce animation products for a third to a fourth of what it costs the big Hollywood studios.

Indian talent

In other ways too, Indian talent has been increasingly in evidence: The Technical Director of Pixar-Disney's 2004 animated hit "The Incredibles" was Valsad, Gujarat-born Kamal Mistry, while at least a dozen other Indians contributed significantly in modelling, shading, hair and clothing simulation.

And over 50 Indian animators laboured for 18 months in the Malad, Mumbai studios of Los Angeles-headquartered Rhythm&Hues, to create CGI effects for the latest Disney film "Chronicles of Narnia," a mixture of live action and animation that opened its India run on January 26.

Earlier, Chennai-based special effects specialist N. Madhusudhanan contributed to the CGI that went into the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and has since joined with its producer Barrie Osborne in setting up a unit in India, dedicated to meeting the global demand for "FX" (industry short hand for computer special effects).

The NASSCOM Study on Animation and Gaming Industry in India, released earlier this month in Hyderabad, estimates the global opportunity in this sector at $ 55 billion today, with the Indian market taking $ 285 million in 2005. It sees the opportunity rise to $ 950 million by 2009. Not all of this is outsourced business.

The end of 2005 saw Indian theatres playing `desi' animated and live-action - animated full-length features like "Bhagmati" and "Hanuman."

Interestingly last week, even as the Disney takeover of the technology-intensive Pixar was announced, the Orlando, Florida-based DisneyWorld theme park complex, was host to over 5,000 programmers and developers at the IBM-sponsored `Lotusphere 2006' conference, where the proceedings were kicked off, not by an Information Technology leader but by a well known American TV and film personality, Jason Alexander. The star of the most popular comedy in U.S. TV history, "Seinfeld" (currently running on Star World in India), warned the entertainment industry that Internet had irreversibly changed the century-old business of popular Cinema and TV. New film-makers now taste freedom — driven by technology and a mouse click — to make cinematic products unshackled by the old studio system.

Independent films outnumber studio-productions, by a factor of 10, he added; "Dreamers can now be doers," thanks to unprecedented collaborative tools offered by the Information Technology industry. These same tools may soon put India on the world map as a sought-after destination for compellingly priced, artistically superior products in the new emerging sangam of Cinema and Cyberia.

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