Mahabharat Hindi Movie
It's amazing how despite the countless animated versions of our mythological sagas like Ramayan or Mahabharat being televised on small screen, filmmakers still invest heaps of money on making animation movies on the same. The latest case is that of producer Jayantilal Gada and director Amaan Khan who present a concised version of Indian mythology's ultimate epic war saga Mahabharat.
The movie starts off by stating its real objective, that of educating the youth of today about the rich mythology of India. You expect the film to trace the entire graph of the epic saga right from its highs and lows but what you see instead is a highly commercialised version of the story. The movie touches upon only the iconic portions of the story and jumping from one key sequence to the other very conviniently.
Given the fact that it's difficult to encompass the mammoth saga in a matter of two hours you still let go of the narrative glitches but what gets beyond tolerance is the animation work. The effects and animation is extremely dated and shoddy and reminds you of the low budget student animation projects which too may now have started becoming better than this film. What comes as a surprise then is the boastful claim of the makers for this film to be the ost expensive animation film India has produced. Wonder where the money vanished...
Worse still, there isn't a single character that's appealing or soothing to the eye. The design work is dreadful. Never have the characters of Mahabharat appeared scary. One has often seen extremely brawny portrayals of the Kauravas and Pandavas and extremely petite versions of the feminine characters however; Jayantilal Gada's Mahabharat is all about disfigured characters with zombie faces.
The makers managed to rope in big superstars to dub for the characters of the epic saga so you have Amitabh Bachchan as Bhishma, Vidya Balan as Draupadi, Ajay Devgn as Arjun, Anil Kapoor as Karna, Sunny Deol as Bhim, Jackie Shroff as Duryodhan and Shatrughan Sinha as Krishna. It's all courtesy the line up of the superstars that the makers try giving the characters the faces that resemble the stars. However, in the process contort and disfigure celebrities to such extents that they start scaring you instead.
Jayantilal Gada's Mahabharat in short is a shoddy and insipid representation of a mighty mythology which really has no potential to entice the kids.
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