The wait is finally over! After fishing around to get a glimpse of the aesthetically Indian animated Fisherwoman and TukTuk, we will now be able to meet the fisherwoman, digitally. The film is now available for all on YouTube.
Bringing out the Indian aura, the film is colourful, bright, loud, fun and brings out immense hope and courage. It is a wild, exuberant and joyful tale of a woman with huge desires and the adventure she is looking forward to.
This is the first of the three films that Eriyat had started to work on. “It feels great to launch the film on public domain after a five year wait. The film has been moving around the festival circuit and it has been licensed to Japan for a period of three years in a specific category of exposure,” mentioned Studio Eeksaurus founder Suresh Eriyat.
The animation project also won India’s 63rd National Award for Animation amongst other 18 accolades. “I was hoping that a platform would arrive in India to showcase such artistic short animated films soon back in 2015, but since there is no luck there yet, we felt we shouldn’t deprive the interested lot the opportunity to see the film,” he added.
Eriyat is happy and overwhelmed by the response the team is getting through all their social media handles. “This was the first film that we made in-house as a conscious effort to put our energies and resources aside to develop such artistic films for the greater good of nurturing our animation industry’s aesthetic sensibilities and storytelling capabilities,” Eriyat said.
With the release of Tokri and Fisherwoman and Tuk Tuk, and the subsequent acceptance, the team at Studio Eeksaurus is planning on releasing all their short films one by one on the public domain. “I hope this movement urges every aspiring animation film maker or animator to create something on their own that is meaningful to themselves first, without expecting money or support from outside. It just takes a bit of willingness to keep some time aside to create such stories or films, but for that we must first be willing,” he concluded.
Fisherwoman and TukTuk is a story of a middle-aged fisherwoman who dreams of owning an auto rickshaw and the subsequent consequences. When she discovers a pearl in the belly of a fish, a Konkani fisherwoman resigned to a mundane life of daily struggle, abandons her trade and indulges in her wildest fantasy. She buys herself a brightly colored rickshaw (“tuk tuk”) and starts to cruise at lightning speed through the winding roads of her coastal village, with her cats in tow. Finally released from her daily drudgery, ecstatic at her newly found sense of power and freedom, she is the talk of the town and her own greatest hero, when, suddenly, an accident threatens to thwart her indomitable spirit.