Roshan Kurichyanil’s earliest memories with a canvas were from when he used to sneak into his uncle’s studio when he wasn’t around. How he went from there to doing those killer comic animation sequences in Mani Ratnam’s O Kadhal Kanmani, is what makes his story so compelling. It’s a story that’s writ with failure before there’s a happy ending. Like any other middle class boy his age, he tried to crack different entrance exams. He failed all of them. He even had to walk out of an interview at the College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum as the panel wasn’t thrilled with the photographs of his sculptures.
Repressing the art-ache inside him, he signed up for a bachelor’s in English literature. “I picked up an interest in storytelling during my degree. I had art on my mind and storytelling in my heart. I knew I needed to give in to that,” he says. He chose animation as the perfect meeting point of both those passions and headed to an institute called Toonz, where he learnt 3D animation and later started working for an Indian animation studio.
And then that began to wane too. Three years down the line, he realised that the sketches he did waiting for his animation to render became more interesting than the animation itself, “I was 25 then and I had worked on different projects till then, but as an artist I wasn’t recognised,” he says. So he quit his job and along with two friends created Libera Artisti and did their first comic about drug cartels in Colombia. That’s when one of his friends asked them if they had any connection with Colombia. That hit them hard and so they shelved it.
But that didn’t stop them. When Comic Con came to India they booked a stall to promote their comic Autopilot — a sarcastic commentary on society centred around an auto rickshaw driver. It sold out by the second day.
From there, there was no looking back. He began working as an art director for a studio which planned to turn their comic into an animated series. That never materialised but it did pave the way to his working with Mani Ratnam on O Kadhal Kanmani’s credit sequence.
He was also the show director for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s signature film. It just wasn’t hands-on enough for him. He has started learning from people who work at Pixar and Dreamworks through a website called Schoolism, “When you reach a position of art director, the effort you have to put in gradually decreases and slowly you resort to giving instructions rather than creating something. So I took a break and started creating again.”
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