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Genre:
Adventure, Children, Animation |
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Music:
Tapas Relia |
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Lyrics:
Satish Mutatkar |
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Banner:
Percept Picture Company |
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Dialogue
Writer:
Anurag Kashyap |
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Sound
Designer:
Sanjay Maurya |
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Associate
Producer:
Vinu Thomas |
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Executive
Producer: Sumit Kumar |
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Direction:
V. G. Samant |
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The importance of the three pillar of cinema script,
direction and editing is not confined to live features but
also extends to animation, documentaries and anything on
movie camera. Nothing highlights this more than The Return
Of Hanuman, a complete anticlimax after the pioneering and
enlightening Hanuman in 2005. |
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Maybe, too late in the day, the producers realized
this somewhere, so right in the beginning of the
credit titles they clarify that this is not a
sequel. After all, every sequel since 2006 has
bettered the predecessor!
The importance of a director who knows clearly what
he is doing is again spotlighted graphically.
Director (?) and co-writer (??) Anurag Kashyap is
least equipped to deal with the rather fanciful
subject of Lord Hanuman wanting to be an earthly kid
and being born in a humble family.
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With the right creative team at the helm, this could
have been a wonderful exercise with high fun and novelty
quotients! But he lets things go completely haywire, neither
satiating animation feature buffs, nor devotees of the lord,
nor fans of the first film and certainly not the
international audience the film wants to target. In simple
words, he makes a global laughing stock of Hindu mythology
and the superhero genre! |
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For one, he brings in a convoluted semi-mythological
angle where Shukracharya, the guru of demons, takes
on the shape of the planet Shukra Shukracharya
curses mankind that it would be destroyed by a
creature created by his own sins. A very much adult
Hanuman is envious of the fun some school kids are
having and after sight seeing around the world to a
very modern background track the liberties taken
here including the Statue of Liberty dancing. |
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Hanuman is born to a village pandit and his wife as a cute
kid with a tail, a monkey like countenance and an insatiable
appetite that soon finishes every grain of food in the
village. The funny angle here is not exploited well.
Meanwhile a whole lot of dark things happen. There is a
mysterious wall as high as a mountain behind which demons
reside in the village. The pandit joins the many missing
people and everyone’s cool about it including Hanuman and
the priest’s wife! Finally Maruti has to save the world from
parlay unleashed by the demons, apart from the kid solving
the problems of his schoolmates, including a kid who is an
underdog. |
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The absurdities and irreverent things shown
in the film are plain mind boggling apart
from being sometimes offensive in the
desperate effort to be with it and appeal to
a generation that should be educated
instead. The script is painful we do not
mind Hanuman as well as his kid avatar
Maruti using English words, but we must draw
a line at cameras focusing on the behinds of
mini-skirt wearing females cavorting to
music, or Hanuman threatening to expose
Narad’s eavesdropping on Lord Brahma’s
romantic rendezvous! |
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| Yes,
technically the film is amazing. Though Indian people are as
usual drawn with drab facial features, the actual animation
has been superlatively done and the Toons Animation team
deserves high kudos. The background music is familiar but
competent and the songs barely there. |
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And one final word to all those behind the content
of the film – the liberties taken here can be only
tolerated by the liberal Hindus. Try this with the
other religions and deities and you will know what
it means. If you cannot educate Indian children with
our great mythological heroes, stay away and make
another dark thriller or namby-pamby rom com. With
his legendary magnanimity, Hanuman may forgive you,
but not the audience. And very successive generation
is bringing up more intelligent children whose
tolerance level to sheer nonsense is reducing by the
day! |
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