Children's films have rarely been successful: Ketan Mehta

Director Ketan Mehta says one of the reason why producers have shied away from making too many children's films is because they have not been successful commercially, something which can change with just one good movie.

The National Award-winning filmmaker says when he was making superstar Aamir Khan-starrer "Mangal Pandey: The Rising" in 2005, people were skeptical as biopics were not in vogue in those days.

"So far children's films have not been successful here. May be that is the reason why producer's have shied away from them. But all it takes is one film to change the trend. I remember when I was making 'Mangal Pandey', people said 'why am I making a biopic, nobody watches it'," Ketan told PTI.
 

According to the director, things have changed today.

"At that time, biopics were not in trend. So, people were not too sure. Today so many biopics are coming out and working too. Similarly, even with the animation industry, we are going ahead and progressing really quickly."

Ketan has produced the animated film "Motu Patlu: King of Kings", based on the popular TV series for children. The story revolves around two best friends from Furfuri Nagar. The characters are adapted from the classic Hindi comic magazine "Lot Pot".

The filmmaker said though the show helped them establish the basic characters, the aim of the makers was to make it better.

"The TV programme is extremely popular and has been running for nearly 3-4 years. So in terms of characters for the film, we already had that. We were ready for it. But our main aim was to make the film better."

"Doing animation for films is different from TV. So we had to take the scale higher and make sure that the audience gets a new experience watching the film, even though they have seen and loved the TV series," he added.

The filmmaker is also working on an animated movie, based on noted author Rudyard Kipling's novel "Kim", and said work for it is going on.

Directed by Suhas D Kadav, "Motu Patlu: King of Kings" is scheduled to release on October 14.