Animagic Studios has done it again. It has created and animated caricature versions of Bollywood actors Sanjay Dutt & Ajay Devgn for the David Dhawan film ‘Rascals‘, which released this week all over India. This 3.5 minutes title sequence in 2D animation has CG elements as well, this has been made for the opening credits of the film and it stylishly introduces the characters of the protagonists (Sanjay & Ajay).
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Animation Filmmaker and Director, Animagic’s Chetan Sharma shares, “The characters of Sanjay and Ajay are conmen in the film and the the title sequence is designed around their pranks. David had seen our caricature of Munnabhai and wanted us to design for Rascals. He had some ideas, but apart from that the entire staging, story and the look of the sequence was completely left to us. We wanted it to be glitzy, popish and as the characters are scamsters, a little screwball too.”
Animagic took the title track and developed the entire story with the gags and cons along with the designs for the sequence. The movie already had a graffiti styled logo, so the studio decided to give the sequence a hip hop music video feel. It starts with two hooded characters painting something on the wall with spray cans, and then the logo of the film is revealed on the wall as the hoods of Sanjay and Ajay come off.
“From then on we have a mini music video with a lot of posturing by the two heroes surrounded by babes,” Chetan adds. In their first look poster, the two actors had a ‘born rascals’ tattoo on them. The studio decided to incorporate that by showing Sanju’s character rip open his shirt with that tattoo, that leads us into the first gag sequence where Sanju is a little baby, who already is upto tricks with the nurse!!” This nurse of course is a bodacious, every man’s fantasy nurse and he stops crying instantly on setting eyes on her! And after she leaves, the audience realizes that he has flicked her necklace.
The title track contains the lines which say ‘Chaaloo, cheap charlie, hum hain lafantar do..hai lucche phir bhi classy, it is a wonder, no?!’ “We realized that the David Dhawan genre of films features much double entendre and we wanted to tip our hat to it! When you do David Dhawan, you must do as David Dhawan. I was his ‘chela’ for the duration of this project! I tried to think like that!”, adds Chetan Sharma.
For Ajay, we depicted him as a young boy conning a honeymooning couple of their camera. We went back to his look 15 years ago, as in ‘Phool Aur Kaante’ and regressed that to create an Ajay in his early teens. As he runs away from the scene, we did a filmy transition just showing the feet as he grows up into today’s Ajay.
In the complete sequence the stories of these characters are taking place separately, towards the end they bump into each other while carrying suitcases loaded with stolen money and money goes flying everywhere and that is when the credit of the Producer aptly comes. One of the notes gets stuck on the camera for a second, and it’s a note with David Dhawan in the place of Mahatma Gandhi.
These animation avatars also come briefly at interval and the end of the film.
“We designed the opening credits also in the graffiti manner, though keeping a whole bunch of names legible in that style was a challenge. Davidji was very impressed with our work, he felt we had created an original film for his film and to his credit. He was insistent that we have separate credit (it earlier shared space with DI & FX) in the sequence”, Chetan concluded.