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THR India's 25 in 25: A Tiny Giant and A Daring Vision in 'Eega'
The Hollywood Reporter India picks the 25 best Indian films of the 21st century. S. S. Rajamouli’s daring vision in 'Eega' turned absurd fantasy into a heartfelt epic.
Eega (2012) is director S.S. Rajamouli’s most fiercely original film, and also one of the most genre-defying, industry-defining Telugu films ever made. For one, its protagonist is a fly — in an industry that thrives on male stardom and devotional subservience to this stardom, the whistles this time were reserved for an insect. Besides being one of the most VFX-heavy Telugu films, it ushered in the possibility of a new kind of movie.
While Rajamouli’s subsequent films — both parts of Baahubali, which opened the floodgates for pan-Indian films and RRR, where this pan-Indian ambition found a global resonance — were celebrated at a decibel much higher than Eega, Rajamouli himself noted at a pre-release event for another film that Eega is, in his view, his best film.
Written by Rajamouli’s father and constant collaborator, Vijayendra Prasad, the film follows a young couple (Samantha Ruth Prabhu as Bindu and Nani as Nani) whose romance gets cut short by the villain Sudeepa (Sudeep), who kills Nani out of jealousy. Nani then reincarnates as a fly and tortures Sudeepa until his demise. A tragic loss of hope is immediately upended by a playful revenge saga, where the humour does not diminish the anger.
It is not just the playfulness of the hero, but the grotesque villainy that caught people’s imagination. Rajinikanth even tweeted about Sudeep’s performance: “I thought I was the best villain to date. But you beat me to it”.
S.S. Rajamouli on Making Eega
This wasn’t Rajamouli’s first brush with technology. Previously, he’d made Magadheera, but as he told News18, “There is a world of difference between the graphics in Magadheera and those in Eega. Here, Eega, an animated character, is the foreground; whereas in Magadheera, graphics were in the background. That is why we cannot afford to commit any errors in the graphics. Some loopholes in Magadheera’s graphics were overlooked by the audience. Be it the conception or the execution, Eega is a much tougher job.”
In fact, after having shot a significant portion of the film, when the VFX company showed him what they had made, Rajamouli felt his film collapse in front of his eyes. “The fly didn't look like a fly, the movements were jerky…we would have spent ₹10 crores or so by then. Had it been ₹50 lakhs or ₹ 1 crore, I would’ve pulled the plug on the project,” he told Ragalahari Talkies.
The filmmaker went back to the drawing board and back to nature — capturing flies in bottles and then refrigerating them to make them unconscious so they could be photographed with lenses that made every detail on their bodies shine. As Rajamouli was searching for his hero under the microscope, the budget of a film that was initially supposed to be quick and easy — “The idea was to release it in a few multiplexes,” Rajamouli told News18 — was ballooning.
His cinematographer K.K. Senthil Kumar told Film Companion, “It was the most challenging film. I’d say it is much more challenging than RRR (2022). We had no reference point. We had not seen anyone do it. The closest that people could come to doing something like this was animation. I watched A Bug’s Life (1998) for inspiration, but hadn’t done something like this in real life. Creating the hero of the film, which was a fly, was the biggest challenge.”
Eega released alongside its Tamil-dub Naan Ee and Malayalam-dub Eecha, with the Hindi-dub, Makkhi arriving a few months later. The film was even dubbed into Swahili as Inzi, making Eega the first Telugu film to be released widely across Africa. Eega became one of the highest-grossing Telugu films of the year, earning more than ₹125 crores.
The film also won two National Film Awards — one for Best Feature Film in Telugu and the other for Best Special Effects.