A war between Red and Black Ants makes for a very interesting premise for an animated feature. Cheenti Cheenti Bang Bang is a 82 min long being produced jointly by Elecom Animation Academy, a Kolkata-based animation training institute, and Mumbai’s Fiesta Entertainment and will be released in May this year.
SEE THE TRAILER
The name of the film is a clever play on words (an ant is called a Cheenti in Hindi) and has absolutely nothing to do with the 1964 Ian Fleming book – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or the 1968 film by the same name. It is actually based on ‘Lal Kalo’ (Red Black), a popular Bengali children’s novel by Girindrashekhar Basu.
After an investment of two years and rupees five crore, I just hope that the story is well crafted and engrossing. The characters are quite intriguing and very colourful and it looks like the creators have deliberately given the film a children’s illustrated novel feel. Personally, I am happy for two reasons:
1) That they have strayed off the beaten track of mythology.
2) They have maintained an Indian Folk Art style in the look of the film and not tried to just ape Disney.The lip sync seems a bit off in the online trailers, but I do not want to judge them by that at this point. Here are some more clips from the film – all of them songs (How can any Indian film be complete without song and dance routines and dream sequences?!!)
C2B2 is the story of two warring kingdoms of ants (red ants and black ants) the twist being that Lohit, the Prince of the red ants and Krishna, the Princess of the black ants are in love with each other. The film works on the premise that – War Never Pays and that unity and peace are the driving factors of a nation’s health.
The characters have been sketched manually in the classical style by a team of 80 animators. The six songs in the film have been sung by the likes of Ustad Rashid Khan, Shaan and Shreya Ghosal. The post-production, including dubbing, has been done at Fiesta’s studio in Mumbai. Cheenti Cheenti Bang Bang features the voices of well-known actors like Ashish Vidyarthi, Mahesh Manjrekar, Asrani and Anjan Srivastava.
A sequel is also in the offing, besides which they are also planning a 3-D film based on Dwarkaprasad Chetri’s ‘Bhootnath’.
The Elecom group is based in Kolkata. Fiesta is a Mumbai-based complete post-production facility, which in the last three years has been involved in the post-production of major Bollywood blockbusters like Munnabhai MBBS, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Corporate, Bhoot, Koi Mil Gaya, Iqbaal, Murder, Hum Tum, Kaho Na Pyar Hai etc. Ellecom Fiesta Entertainment Private Ltd. is the collaboration between these two companies for the sake of producing animation films.