‘Animation is for kids’, that’s how I started seeing animation when I started understanding that the cartoons, I was watching, are animation! It’s unsurprising that when I was not recognizing it as an animation, I was also not distinguishing it as a different, ‘unrealistic’ world.

Unrealistic —now, surprisingly to me— is not uninteresting.

Do you like unrealistic movies?

Do you like unrealistic paintings?

Do you like surreal views?

While writing or while experiencing stories or movies, I have always appreciated reality a lot. I feel reality is super relatable. And an easy bias I ended up having is ‘unrealistic is unrelatable’.

The belief amusingly broke when I was watching the movie - Maariya: The Ocean Angel. It’s not the movie that is unrealistic, but rather the way the personification of a sex doll, an unreal human representation, is used to provide a lens into human interactions and behaviors in society, without being impacted by societal constraints! You put aside what you are fine to watch and what is unacceptable to you, for a while, and you perceive the unfamiliar world, without biases.

A character falling onto a pile of human feces leads to disgust in the real world while humor in an unreal world. And it didn’t take a while to get more insights about the way Munnabhai MBBS, Forrest Gump, and the secret life of Walter Mitty, is made where you might say during the movie, ‘esa reality main kahan hota hai!’ but the films leave you with a bunch of very relatable thoughts!

Our bizarre behavior is our tendency to quickly accept the rules of the imaginary world presented to us. Just like we accept and understand all the rules of The Wizarding World in Harry Potter while we are experiencing it.

Animation is, possibly, the most powerful medium to create such imaginary worlds. You don’t have to worry about the explanation of how a clownfish can navigate through deep seas to find Nemo! And you can quickly connect with all the characters inside Riley’s head!

Nowadays, I animate almost every idea in my head. My exploration started with the world of Pixar. I started watching movies, tutorials, and reading. The book I want to refer to is Creativity, INC. It is about inspiration for creativity and Pixar as an organization, but what I loved most was the experimental and artistic approach to building a business.