What are the five animation characters that come to the top of your mind? 99 times out of 100, those characters that pop up immediately in your imagination will be from Hollywood. The most famous and recognizable animation characters are not from India, Canada, Germany, the U.K., or Japan; they are all from Hollywood, U.S.A. This is what makes me believe that animation has been essentially driven by Hollywood.

That fact is also visible in the way our animation industry, though technically animation still has not attained industry status in India, has shaped up. Animation companies have been around for the last 6-7 years, doing work outsourced by Hollywood studios. It was in 2003 that the first long-format TV series created out of India was aired on PBS in the U.S. The 26 and a half hour long series opened up a host of opportunities for the animation business in India, while also getting nominated for the Annie’s award. With the series, India was established as a destination offering high quality animation for a competitive price. The years since have been followed by a lot of outsourcing by Hollywood studios, as also producers of TV shows in the U.S.
In addition to this, a large volume of animation work in the areas of medical, research, defence, and education have been done out of India. But at any point of time, entertainment has constituted the biggest chunk of the animation business.

Broadly, animation (in the entertainment space) can be divided into three formats: animation for TV series, animation for the DTH market, and animation for feature films, the three being successively higher up the value chain.

The types of animation that we have seen over the years, on the other hand, are as follows:
* First, there was traditional animation, which continues to be a top draw today.
* Second, claymation came into being. Claymation is a very laborious procedure, whereby characters are moulded out of clay, which are then animated.