Printed Rainbow

Director: Gitanjali Rao
Release Date: May 2006
Rating: ★★★★
Review:

An old woman lives in a little flat and uses her collection of matchboxes to dream away to more adventurous lives.

In this film Rao contrasts the dull and lonely reality (in grey tones) with the colorful matchbox-based fantasies. The mood is poetic, and the film progresses at a gentle speed. Rao’s designs are sometimes naive, but her animation skills are splendid. She’s absolutely one of the masters of painted animation. Especially noteworthy is her animation of the cat. Also important is Rajivan Ayyappan’s sound design, which is spot on.

‘Printed Rainbow’ is by all means a mature work. Rao’s work is even more impressive, when one considers that she wrote, animated, directed and produced the film on her own in India, a country with a rather short animation history. Although India has made some strides in commercial animation, independent animation is still very rare. Thus Rao’s work is all the more wonderful. Luckily, more people saw it that way and Rao’s film won no less than 22 awards.

Watch ‘Printed Rainbow’ yourself and tell me what you think:

‘Printed Rainbow’ is available on the DVD ‘International Animation: Modern Classics’