India meets Japan, in a frame

Anime is emerging as a cultural bridge between two creative economics, linking Japan's global content industry with India’s evolving creative economy, driven by a rising pool of talent, studios and storytellers

- AYUSHI SINGH

A crimson sun bleeds through glass towers as smoke curls between skyscrapers. The city below hums like a living circuit. On glowing monitors, lines of code flicker into battlefield maps. Faces flash by — of soldiers, rebels, ghosts of memory — all drawn with Japanese precision.

This is anime, of course. But there’s something unmistakably Indian about it — a sepia-lit soldier in round glasses and khakis is saluting against a burning sky, his uniform and cadence recalling Indian independence hero Subhas Chandra Bose.

A murmur of recognition ripples through the Mumbai auditorium showing the trailer of DON, the debut anime by Kushagra Kushwaha, an IIT Guwahati graduate who's spent eight years in Tokyo's studios honing the craft of this peculiarly Japanese cinema form.

Showcasing anime’s trademark grammar of movement and silence, the film imagines a world where data replaces ideology, its pulse carrying echoes of a shared history — Japan’s discipline, Indian defiance.

"When I began working in Japan, I thought I was learning how to animate,” Kushwaha said. “But really, I was learning how to listen to silence, to rhythm, to control. India gave me chaos, Japan gave me structure. DON is where both finally meet.”

When the trailer played at Mumbai's Royal Opera House earlier this month, the applause was spontaneous — an Indian voice fluent in Japan’s visual language, drawing its own frame, had struck a chord. Bollywood celebs Riteish Deshmukh, Abhay Deol, filmmaker Zoya Akhtar and Tanmay Bhat were in the audience, signalling how anime, wildly popular across the world, has begun to find its place in India’s wider creative imagination. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is also a fan.

That nod to Bose wasn't accidental: “