Visual storytelling, especially the medium of art and animation, has the power of universality – it speaks to the soul of the audience, going beyond boundaries of culture, language, religion, gender, nationality, etc. This can be seen in the works of Japanese masters like Miyazaki and Takahata and American masters like Disney and Lasseter. Their films are a testimony to the power of animation that speaks to our core, irrespective of who we are and where we are from.
My lifelong passion and journey has been to create authentic and personal visual stories about the Indian way of life, my way of life, using this medium and have it speak to the world. In the small pockets of content that I had been creating independently, I could see its potential, power and value. And I could also see the lack of this kind of content at scale, beyond a few independent artists.
So after a few meanderings and a lot of stumbling in various forms, this eventually led to the formation of The Happy Slate, with the dream to fulfil the potential and possibility of animated content from India.
The dream was kicked off with my fellow artists Deep and Shaina and it took real shape when I was joined by my 3 co-founders , Rajesh, Deb and Shilpa, each sharing in the dream selflessly and adding new missing dimensions to it.
We have managed to invest our resources and processes into creating original content consistently week on week, while continuing to create commissioned films for our customers and Brands. This has helped create processes that keep us focused on our strength, visual storytelling while having the ability to deliver it consistently and on time. And that is a tricky, tricky balance to achieve in the creative industry. And clients love it!
The vision of THS is to push the boundaries of visual storytelling led animated content, do it consistently, and realise the potential of Indian animation in the world. The journey so far has been exciting and encouraging and we can’t wait for it to take us and the Indian Animation scene to places !
