Plagiarism in indian animation

Plagiarism has become an integral part of indian media.Right
from music in films and ads to the so called animation industry which
some industry experts say would be a booming industry.If you take people
who blatantly copy characters from other well known animation studios, how
can you claim that indian animation industry will be ‘the most sought after’ in future?.
What kind of ‘Character artists’ are these who themselves are characterless?.

People don’t realise much of the plagiarism and even if they do
they disguise it under the name of ‘inspiration’.If you look at the
cartoon characters of other international studios,they have something new everytime.
When MGM studios made “Tom and Jerry”,they drew a cat which was their trademark,
and the same cat( the features and color and structure) was never used by Hanna Barbera Studios
when they mad “TopCat” in the 60’s.Even warner brothers had their own different
version of cat ‘Sylvester’ which was totally different from the other two.
If you compare these three cartoon characters you can’t
find any similarity between them.There is something called creativity that is
required in an animator and I don’t find this in indian animations.

Now if can you remember a movie called “Raju Chacha” with Ajay Devgan and Kajol in
lead,there is song where Ajay tells some children a story about a lion.Now this story
part of the movie was animated and the animated lions were directly copied from
Disney’s Lion king. Even the recent mythological animations get ‘inspired’ heavily
by yugo sako’s The Prince of light a.k.a The legend of prince Ram, an international
animation film about lord Ram.

If remembering old things is a bit difficult,  take a look at the New Mentos add which shows a Donkey
using an ape as a slave and how after eating Mentos the ape evolves into a man
and uses the donkey as slave.In this particular advertisement, the donkey is copied from
“The shrek” and the character of the evolved man is again directly copied from “Shrek-2″.How shameless!
Just watch the video on youtube and decide for yourself
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=uc1iEFkahEA

Let us hope indian animation firms will atleast try to take people with intrest in arts and especially those with creative and humorous attitude.C’mon wake up.