Animating Traditional Pottery, in India
At Animation Obsessive, we explore stories from the wide, wide world of animation — including stories rarely told. Expect human craft and buried treasure, every Sunday (for everyone) and Thursday (for paying subscribers).
Welcome! Glad you could join us. It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the slate:
1. Stunning stop motion from India.
2. A Mexican puppet film premieres online.
3. Animation newsbits.
4. The last word.
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With that, let’s go!
1. New material
At the present time, one of the most fascinating animation teams anywhere is Studio Eeksaurus. Whenever it shares a new project, we take note.
You might know its Desi Oon (2025). The company, based in Mumbai, made it as a commission — part of a push to revive India’s wool economy. Working with the wool of actual Deccani sheep, and a remarkable song in Hindi, Eeksaurus animated one of our favorite films of last year.
It does plenty of standout commissions: India Lens, that JSW Steel ad. And its indie productions (like Seen It! and The Legend of Arana) are frequently excellent.
There’s always some fresh approach in an Eeksaurus film, whether it uses clay, CGI, drawings or materials we’ve never seen animated. We’ve come to expect curveballs. But the studio’s latest film, The Godawan, still took us by surprise.
It’s another commission tied to a problem. Godawan is an Indian whiskey brand named after the endangered Godawan, or Great Indian Bustard. For years, the brand has fought to save the species. It hired Eeksaurus to make a film about that effort, and to explain why the Godawan needs protection. To do it, Eeksaurus invented a mind-bending technique: animation with traditional pottery.
We almost couldn’t believe what we were seeing. So, our teammate John emailed Suresh Eriyat (the director, and Eeksaurus’s founder) to learn how The Godawan happened. You’ll find their conversation below, edited for length, clarity and flow.
John (Animation Obsessive): How did Eeksaurus get involved in the Godawan project?
Suresh Eriyat: It came to us through 22feet Tribal. Rahul Mathew, a friend and the agency’s Chief Creative Officer, approached me and spoke about the good work Godawan, the brand, was doing in saving the rare bird.
He suggested that there was an opportunity to tell the story through a rare craft form: Jaipur blue pottery. It seemed like a wonderful way to bring the story to life. Rahul also had our film Desi Oon in mind. I think he was imagining something along similar lines.
Getting the client to commit to the idea wasn’t easy. We began discussions in May 2025, but the project was greenlit only in January 2026, and the film was completed in August 2026. The idea had been living with me for almost six months before we could actually begin making it, and the journey from those early talks to the film was one of constant refinement and experimentation.
John: Could you talk about how the unique animation technique for this film was invented?
Suresh: The brand’s packaging featured Jaipur blue pottery-inspired designs. That gave us a starting point. If Godawan was already associated with this craft, why not use ceramics themselves as the medium?
I began by writing what I call a lyrical structure. It wasn’t poetry in the conventional sense, but a way to establish what the film needed to convey and the narrative beats. [I’d used this type of structure in Desi Oon, where it] was developed into Hindi lyrics by the writer Swanand Kirkire. We’d then built the music around it, and I’d visualized the film in response to the music and lyrics. I wanted to follow a similar approach with The Godawan.
After the agency vetted the lyrical structure, we created the final lyrics. I was keen that we use authentic Rajasthani dialect rather than Hindi, as I wanted the song to carry the nuances of the region and possibly become a folk song that people might make their own.
Rahul suggested that a character could narrate the story, and we felt that an unhatched egg would be a powerful choice. That little egg became our storyteller. It survives while the bird population is being destroyed indiscriminately, and it becomes a witness to the efforts of the Godawan team in Rajasthan. When the rescue and restoration project began in 2019, the Great Indian Bustard population stood at around 90 birds; it is estimated at 173 today.
There was another, slightly selfish ambition I had. I hoped that our designs featuring the Godawan on ceramics might inspire Jaipur blue pottery artists to incorporate the bird into their own work. That would give the craft another subject to explore while also raising awareness about the bird.
We looked into whether blue pottery artisans [themselves] could make the pieces for us, but we learned that the firing process involves significant uncertainty. Many pieces get damaged or destroyed. So, we did the animation in 2D first, and then each frame was placed onto individual ceramics, one by one, to create shots that we filmed in stop motion. The components were all prepared in advance, including the broken [fragments].
John: What went into building a system that allowed the team to work this way, and how were the ceramics sourced and organized?
Suresh: When the song was ready, I storyboarded the film in around eight to ten hours. I’d imagined the visuals while creating the lyrical structure, so it was relatively straightforward to turn those ideas into a storyboard. Adithi Krishnadas, an animator and director at Eeksaurus, took charge of the animatics. [This planning] helped us determine the surfaces we would need: plates, tiles, jars, vases and other objects.
Most of the pieces were bought ready-made, but some had to be specially created to [suit given shots]. We transferred the blue pottery-inspired artwork of the 2D animation team onto the ceramics, sometimes digitally and some other times manually, using glazes, decals and so on. There wasn’t one process; [our methods changed] depending on what each shot demanded.
The principle, however, was consistent. Ceramics had to be the fundamental material and the filmmaking had to remain analog. We wanted the physical objects to carry parts of the story.
Our real challenge lay in making the ceramics feel like ceramics. The storyboard looked beautiful in its graphic form, but, when we [tried to execute it], the material didn’t come through. We first shot the sequence in which the family of the birds is chased by hunters across different periods, from the British era to the present day. Once we transferred the animation onto ceramic tiles and filmed it, the result looked disappointingly like ordinary 2D animation.
The objects seemed like flat surfaces onto which animation had been projected. It was too precise. That defeated the very purpose of choosing blue pottery as our medium. So, we experimented to bring out the ceramics and make them look great.
Aman Gupta, who led the stop-motion animation team, worked with our cinematography team (led by Arun Kumar) to rethink our approach. Instead of placing the tiles individually in the frame, we stacked them at different levels and included other objects in the composition. This created depth, shadows and a more tangible sense of the material. It was a turning point.
Also, we had to take away some of the smoothness of the 2D animation, so that the physical imperfections would emerge. It took several tests before it felt like the film had been made using real objects, rather than computer-generated imagery.
It’s an interesting paradox. Some people assume that a film like this must have been done with AI. When you’ve spent eight months making something so painstakingly, it can be disappointing for people to imagine that it could’ve been done in minutes. But that is the reality of the times. We have to accept that challenge and keep making work that demonstrates what is possible.
John: Are there any moments during the creation of the film that stand out to you, in retrospect?
Suresh: One of the biggest highlights was the day we composed and produced the music with Rajat Dholakia as the music director and Nishant Gupta as the singer. In just under ten hours, everything seemed to fall into place. By the end of that day, we had a track that captured the spirit of the film. It was almost magical.
The final sound mix was another highlight. Working with percussionist Taufiq Qureshi and his team took the music to another level. When Resul Pookkutty added the soundscape and sound effects, the film came alive.
[There was also] the final flying shot of the Godawan, which was a major difficulty. I had a specific feeling in mind for that shot, and, although it was looking beautiful, something wasn’t right. We ended up shooting it three times. It required a tremendous amount of work to recreate the setup and get the details down, but eventually we got there.
John: Is there a scene in The Godawan that you’re particularly pleased with?
Suresh: The first shot that made me say, “Wow, we have a film!” was the sequence in which plates carrying the Godawan’s image were arranged at different levels, almost like an arcade game where you shoot at targets. The shot’s name was 13! When Aman shared it with me, I was ecstatic. The ceramics and the animation had finally come together in the way I’d imagined.
But the shot that gave me the greatest sense of fulfillment was the final one, where the birds fly over a landscape in which the ecosystem has been restored. The vegetation is back, the animals are thriving and the Godawans are flying freely into the clouds, once again. I actually wept when I saw that shot. After months of development and four months of stop-motion shooting, it was a glorious ending to our adventure.
John: On that note — when did the full achievement of this project finally sink in?¹
Suresh: A moment of realization came when we laid out all the pottery we’d used and gathered for a group photograph. Around 40 of us were present that day, although almost a hundred individuals had contributed in different ways. [With that] enormous collection of ceramics surrounding us, it felt a little like standing at the top of Mount Everest.
There were doubts and apprehensions about how this unusual approach would work. To see the client genuinely happy with the film was very gratifying. Films like this are still relatively rare in India, especially for a corporate client. Godawan was already doing meaningful work in conservation, and I wanted our film to inspire other organizations to think about how they could contribute to causes [as well].
John: With films like The Godawan and Desi Oon, and the studio’s recent 10 Years of UPI spot, Eeksaurus’s work feels like it’s leaning in a very physical, real-world direction lately. Could you talk about the thinking behind that?
Suresh: I think our studio has always leaned toward physical and traditional ways of working.
Even when we make CG films, we try to find a route that hasn’t been taken before. It isn’t about establishing a USP [unique selling point]. We believe there is a different kind of joy in making things by hand. Something as simple as using hand-painted textures in a CG film like Fisherwoman and Tuk Tuk can make it feel warmer. There is a quality to handmade work that audiences can sense, even if they can’t always articulate what it is.
When we look at animation, we sometimes see a tendency to return to familiar palettes and established ways of making films. There is nothing wrong with that. But we also feel that every story is a chance to discover a new visual art form or a new material.
For us, the starting point should be the idea, and we should find the visual language and material that bring it to life most effectively. The medium shouldn’t simply be a ready-made palette that we choose out of habit. I think of it as painting. Rather than always using the same color swatches and brushes, why not begin with a fresh set of paints and see what else is possible? Perhaps we use a different tool to apply the paint, or paint on a spherical surface instead of a flat one.
With our 10 Years of UPI film, for instance, we had just 15 days to make it. Given that timeline, we couldn’t have relied on a typical approach such as shooting against a blue screen and replacing the backgrounds later. Apart from being impractical, it would have made the film feel artificial and overly dependent on post-production. We wanted the elements to come together organically, within the physical world of the film.
That has always been our quest at Eeksaurus. Some of our recent projects have simply given us chances to pursue it in a more visible way.
2. Animation news
2.1: Dolores, online
When it comes to puppet animation, some of the world’s finest is Mexican. I Am Frankelda (2025) is only one example. This is a scene with deep roots, whose artists use ingenuity to get around budget constraints. “Mexico cannot compete against Pixar, which is a gigantic 3D [animation] studio,” said a member of that scene in 2022. “Mexico can compete with stop motion.”²
The speaker there works at El Taller del Chucho, a studio set up by Guillermo del Toro. You might know it from Pinocchio. More recently, it took part in Dolores, which premiered on YouTube this week.
Director Cecilia Andalón Delgadillo is a Pinocchio veteran herself. Dolores is her personal film, and its first backer, Carlos Raúl Barba, was a businessman who liked her idea. She tells us, “We only had a short conversation, I told him the story of Dolores, and he said: let’s make it. From that moment I started looking for a crew.” Finally, El Taller del Chucho signed on. Much of the work happened there.³
She calls her experience with the studio “a dream.” It was equipped for a project like this one, and “the people who work there welcomed the whole Dolores crew so warmly.”
Dolores follows a girl who falls into an ancient shaft tomb — a feature of Jalisco, where El Taller del Chucho resides. It’s a dark fairytale. And it’s told without words: communication through movement is a love of Andalón Delgadillo’s.
That said, her film still began with a script, written in the pandemic. “I put into it the things I love: Mexican culture, history, skulls, corn,” she explains. “It was a kind of collage that slowly found a clearer narrative structure. The stories my mother used to tell me, and still tells me, were part of the inspiration, too.”
In her use of puppets, Andalón Delgadillo takes from Jan Švankmajer and Ilka Schönbein, a live puppeteer who specializes in the macabre. “Puppet animation cinema and puppet theater feel deeply connected to me, and I love them both,” she notes. The theater tradition is especially visible in Dolores’s characters; she aimed “to keep a handmade quality throughout.”
As she puts it:
When I was imagining the materiality of the characters, I knew that Dolores and the two girls who play with her had to be made of something close to human skin, because they exist in the real world. In the second part of the story, once we enter the fantastical world, the materials change along with the protagonist: the armadillo is made of clay, and it existed both in clay and in plasticine, and the mummies and skulls combine bone with the remains of corn husks.
The backgrounds are enormous fabrics painted by hand. … Materials felt essential to this film, because they are the foundation of stop motion, and because of my own background in fine arts.
It all came together into a great-looking piece, full of intriguing visual ideas (the wooly fire, the re-forming armadillo, the dance with the mummies). The two years that the team spent on Dolores paid off. You can find the film below:
2.2: Newsbits
We lost actors Eric Bauza (46) and Patrick Stewart (86), Ashita no Joe creator Tetsuya Chiba (87) and the Soviet animation luminaries Irina Kostrina (88) and Jeanna Vitenzon (98).
The Japanese director Rintaro spoke about his career and style, and the dangers of GenAI and safeness in animation. Unless risks are taken and we break away from the past, he argued, there “will be no future.”
The American animator John Pomeroy directed an ad for Prada — a hand-drawn 2D project.
In Britain, LIAF takes place again later this month, and most of the proceedings will be available online. This year’s slate includes Anton Dyakov’s Black Box, Alina Popescu’s Other I and a lot more.
In Cuba, the Norwegian Fund for Cuban Cinema is backing a stop-motion film called Mareas by Ivette Avila Martín, who shares her films on YouTube.
In Nigeria, animator Adeoye Adetunji won awards for his film The Lion of Gwoza, including one worth ₦10 million (around $7,400). See the trailer here.
Japan’s Sunao Katabuchi argued against the trend of changing animation’s colors during remastering.
Finally: a rare book on mid-century design.
3. Last word
Thanks for checking out today’s issue! To wrap up: a few personal thoughts from the two of us:
John: Hope everyone had a fun Halloween. A week and a half ago, a subscriber asked us for advice on an animation screening themed to the holiday (both horror and lighter-hearted work). I figured I’d share our picks here as well, for folks still lingering in the Halloween mood: I’m a Witch, Werewolf Island, Lucia, Night on Bald Mountain (1933), Harpya, The Masque of the Red Death, The Fly (1966) and The Demon. They’re all really interesting, and the first two are just a minute each — I think almost any viewer will find one to love.
Jules: Believe it or not, because of our location, the very first animation festivals we were able to attend were virtual ones, back during the pandemic. A lot of administrative and financial concerns come along with virtual showings, so, as life returned to normal, most festivals understandably went back to their previous structures. It wasn’t clear if we’d be able to regularly keep up with the circuit, but we still find opportunities. I was happy to learn that LIAF, where we watched a number of films we loved in 2024, will have online screenings again later this month. I’m excited to see what we’ll discover this year!
Until next time!
This question was added for flow during the editing pass.
From El País.
Thanks to Luce Grosjean for translating Andalón Delgadillo’s quotes for us. For more details about the making of Dolores, see Le Club de Mediapart, La Gaceta, Milenio and Reforma.
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