Abstract:

Several traditional art forms have transformed into the visual language of many contemporary animation films. However, with this migration of the traditional art form from a static to a dynamic medium, there comes a shift in its intrinsic order and identity. This study focuses on the transformations in visual and overall aesthetics as they get animated and observes what informs that transformation in terms of motion, visuals, and storytelling. The focus would be on tapping the change in the visual syntactic when the intrinsically static art form is animated. There are two parts to this study. The first part is focussed on the visual transformation examples from India, and the second part constitutes examples from Southeast Asia. A cross-cultural comparative analysis approach is being taken to map the similarities and differences in visual transformations in India and neighboring cultures.