Once upon a time...

The rest of that sentence is changing dramatically, in Indian cinema. Gone are the tales set in familiar myth and lore. In their place are dystopian worlds of shrunken rivers, suspended cities, new weaponry and invented languages. See what it takes to bring these worlds to life

- Taranna Khetpal

Think of your favourite imagined world.

Maybe it’s Tolkien's Middle Earth or Rowling’s magic-infused London. The endlessly warring realms of Star Wars or Dune. Or the endlessly whimsical planets that make up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Within these worlds are languages that exist nowhere else; intricate maps and laws of physics; distinctive weaponry; architecture, math, even red tape.

World-building isn’t just a realm with an internal logic whose rules always hold. “It is also a world in which characters are shaped by these environments,” says film critic Baradwaj Rangan. “This is true whether the setting spans galaxies (as in Star Wars) or sits within a single neighbourhood (as in Gojira and Tokyo).”

Disney has been building worlds since 1955. But really, worldbuilding in cinema goes back to the start.

A few years after the Lumiere Brothers screened the world’s first-ever film, in 1895, Georges Méliés made A Trip to the Moon (1902), which created a fully imagined realm through painted backdrops, miniature models and trick photography. Its surreal moonscape, insect-like inhabitants and theatrical visual logic marked an early break from realism.

Not long after, in India, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913) depicted epic realms using painted backdrops, optical illusions and elaborate sets of palaces and forests.

For over a century, much of Indian science-fiction would remain rooted in myth. Which meant that cinema didn’t build worlds so much as draw on existing ones.