Some films arrive like sermons; Blu’s arrives like breath. The less than 10-minute short, recently screened at the Karama Film Festival in Amman, tells the story of a little girl, a leaf, and a world caught between smoke and shade.
What it doesn’t tell on screen is the longer story behind it: a self-taught animator from Kerala, carrying a vision for more than a decade, wrestling it into existence one painstaking frame at a time.
“I didn’t go to animation school,” Rajesh PK, the film’s director says. “I learned by doing.” Raised in Payyannur, he spent his teenage years in fine arts – painting and drawing – before a crash course in multimedia in 2002 taught him tools rather than techniques.
In 2003, he took his first job in Kochi as a 2D animator, building web-era flash loops and learning the rhythm of production. An interior design stint in 2004 proved brief – “boring; not for me” – and he followed the work where it led: Mysore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai. In 2008, he helped build a small team at DreamWorks and soon found himself in the United States, walking into a world that would recalibrate his sense of craft.
DreamWorks Animation was the turning point. “Everything was new to me,” he says. He worked on Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, his first Hollywood feature. He went on to work in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Venom, Trolls, Penguins of Madagascar, The Croods and more. The thrill was matched by a stark realization: “In India, we didn’t have that deep, academic grounding in art.”
By grounding he means anatomy, form, proportion – the rules you master before you break them. “We have so many art schools in India, but specific academic training is rare. Our understanding of shape and form is weak compared to what I saw abroad.” He talks about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as a discipline: “Aesthetic sense is valuable. Once you know the rules, you know how to break them in ways that appeal.”
The comparison extends to cities. A walk through Kannur shows him chaotic, utilitarian buildings – “useful, beyond useful—but no design sense, no appeal” – while Europe teaches him how even ordinary structures carry respect for form. The lesson lands inside him as a filmmaker: art needs structure to sing.
Before animation, he wanted to be a filmmaker or a painter, and Blu’s began as a question of subject rather than medium. A dream he had as a young man under a village tree – “the tree vanished; a sudden feeling of loss and disconnection” – returned when he moved to Bangalore around 2008.
Whitefield was still mud and silence, then, and in four years it transformed so fast that he felt whiplash. Payyannur hadn’t changed in thirty; Bangalore changed in forty-eight months. He wanted a story that connected globally but was born of that ache. “Earth as mother,” he thought first, told from a woman’s perspective; then he narrowed from grown woman to teen to a little girl – the age when butterflies and flowers feel like news.
The name came easily: Blu’s, from the blue planet, made simpler and more conversational by losing an “e” and adding an apostrophe. He storyboarded. He obsessed.
In 2013, he left DreamWorks to make the film and failed. “I realized I couldn’t do it alone,” he says. Life shifted around him: marriage in 2014, a return to the job, the DreamWorks India operation shuttering in 2017, and a move to London to work on major VFX-driven features. He visited galleries, felt nourished, soul-fed. “Life was good,” he admits. But Blu’swouldn’t leave him alone. “It was haunting me – in sleep, daily life. If I wanted to live peacefully, I had to finish it.”
He returned to Kerala, not with a company plan but with a deadline and a vow: never compromise the quality. Production began in 2019 and ended on April 4, 2025, at 5 p.m. – a timestamp he remembers as if it were a birth.
Music by Sushin Shyam changed the film’s pulse midway through, opening “a completely different perspective.” His brief to Sushin was a metaphor he could hold in his hands: “Imagine a leaf falling from a tree shot at 1000 frames per second. You see the organic truth – no one directing it, no one forcing it. That’s what I wanted: soft even through chaos.”
The method was brutal. “We tried to make every frame like a wallpaper,” he says. Frame-by-frame appeal became a philosophy. If every centimeter is designed to please, the story’s simplicity can feel profound. That philosophy made production slow and tense.
“One shot took more than a year,” he says, “because we kept fixing other problems and came back.” The rain shot – Blu running under a leaf – was the first litmus test for whether the film’s look would hold.
He built a hybrid world: 2D and 3D characters against fully 2D-painted environments, with atmospheric effects composited with care. Limitations became creativity. A broken cache forced low-resolution previews; he leaned into darker palettes, glass-like surfaces, reds and blacks to hide artifacts and let mood lead. A tornado sequence was rebuilt to earn its darkness.
Hair became philosophy. Automatic simulation would save time, but he hand-animated strands and clumps for weight and truth. “Nineteen clumps, fifteen controls, a tail – animating every strong line,” he lists. It was maddening for collaborators. “People were frustrated I wouldn’t approve shots. It’s not about tough; it’s about whether it works,” he says. The director’s job is conviction that inspires listening. “Once they saw results, they understood.”
Blu’s original sequencing imagined war – Hiroshima’s shadow as architecture – but the world offered a closer frame: wildfires near Los Angeles, mountains burning in living memory, a personal shock from a place he had lived.
The film maps calamity as montage – Amazonian forests from green to ash, melting snow, ocean garbage, a leaf crossing from dry to living – and then returns to animals. An elephant death evokes Idukki; a teaser nods to “Blue Kakkappoove,” from his own homeland, where as seasons turn, Madayippara’s flowers arrive against the silhouette of Ezhimala.
“We added so many things from Kerala intentionally,” Rajesh says, “and then widened the canvas.” A city underwater evokes New York by design and perspective, a global echo of local grief.
The production’s backbone was a small, persistent network: RedGod Studios (which he set up) on compositing and colleagues who kept at it with limited fundsLed on the animation floor by Animation Director Jeeth Parambentavida and backed by producers, Shibin KV and Jaser PV, who shepherded the project, Blu’s came to life, slowly but steadily. The project was also supported by Shijin, Melvin Hutton, Abhishek Nair and Fazal A Backer (of Manjummal Boys) on the sound design. Friends saw cuts; the film entered an array of festivals; one friend connected him to Nivin Pauly, who agreed to present the film. It mattered. “His name gives value,” Rajesh says.
He is not shy of ambitiion. “The aim is the Oscars,” he says, eyes on qualifying screenings in Los Angeles and San Francisco. If the timeline slides, he wants 2026 to carry Blu’s through festivals.
But even finishing delivered unexpected emptiness. “After April 4th, I felt nothing. Empty,” he says. He went to Goa, didn’t enjoy it, took a month or two to climb out of the zone. Long projects become pain you learn to live with; when they end, absence aches.
What remains is resolve. “We can make feature animation on par with Hollywood,” he says, not as a wish but as a budget line. Technology and talent are reachable; the cost favors India.
What’s scarce is investor courage. He has five or six feature ideas and complete scripts, and conversations are ongoing. “We can do it at one-fifth the cost,” he says. The condition needed is vision and backing. “When that aligns, it’s very much possible.”
Blu’s carries that argument in its silence. It refuses lectures and lets photons and photosynthesis do the talking. It turns a child’s face to the sun and invites adults to remember the straight lines of their own thinking before detours of jargon.
It pulls Kerala’s hills and flowers into a global story and paints calamity without spectacle. It insists that design matters – academic, anatomical, architectural – and that rules learned make art freer.
Rajesh’s journey explains the film’s precision. A self-taught animator who chased discipline abroad and brought it home, he built a 10-minute prayer out of patience. He didn’t compromise a frame. He broke and rebuilt sequences until they worked. He chose hand over automation when truth required it. He accepted limitation as style. And he trusted that if the green returns, we return with it.
Blu’s asks a simple question: what will we carry forward – smoke, or shade? Rajesh carries a third thing forward: craft. In a time when speed seduces, he chose slow. In a culture of detours, he drew a straight line from a vanished village tree to a child lifting her face to light. The leaf falls at 1000 frames per second, and we finally see it.
Read an appreciation of the film here:
നിങ്ങളുടെ അഭിപ്രായങ്ങൾ രേഖപ്പെടുത്തുക