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Mythological epics have always been an inextricable part of Indian culture and the Indian audience. Whether it comes to children’s animation series like Bal Ganesha, Little Krishna, or the live-action remakes of these mythological epics, such as Baahubali: The Beginning or Brahmastra part one - Shiva, this appetite for mythology runs deep. Yet, the depth of the Indian animation landscape remains largely unrecognised by the global industry, even though it keeps producing work of the same calibre.
Today, India’s animation and VFX sector has been valued at well over a billion dollars and is gradually growing each year as a result of home-grown IP. OTT platforms are now commissioning original Indian series, not just licensing completed ones, and animation studios that used to produce someone else’s vision are now building their own.
Charuvi Design Labs, an animation studio founded in 2009 by filmmaker Charuvi Agrawal and based out of Gurugram, Haryana, has spent over a decade making breakthroughs in this space, especially with its latest release Narasimha Awakens: The Legend of Prahlad, which tells the story of Prahlad, a child tormented by his father, entirely from his perspective.
When Charuvi Design Labs made this short film, one of their guiding questions was: how can you make art move? With Narasimha Awakens, it didn’t just answer that, but also proved that animation doesn’t always mean chasing the next big thing or reimagining these mythological relics with overblown grandeur, but to simply stay true to why they still matter culturally.
Perhaps, the biggest thing it proves is that world-class animation can be, and is, entirely possible to create from a studio based in India. Charuvi Design Labs proved this through the use of Epic Games’ real-time 3D creation tool, Unreal Engine.
The studio had just about 48 days to create Narasimha Awakens, a timeline that would be tight even for a much smaller project. But, they bridged that speed because they built the film almost entirely inside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine—an advanced real-time 3D creation tool that helped a film of this scale and vision come to life.
When Agrawal took on this project, she wanted violence to be portrayed not literally, but poetically. While this is challenging to pin down in practice, Unreal Engine’s features, including MetaHuman Creator, MetaHuman Animator and the Niagara effects system, did all the heavy lifting to get there.
MetaHuman Creator was used to build the high-fidelity digital characters themselves, while MetaHuman Animator handled performance capture, enabling face and body animation in a fraction of the time traditional pipelines take, compressing work that could otherwise take weeks into a matter of hours. Niagara, Unreal Engine’s real time VFX system, handled special effects like fire, sand, dust and atmospheric effects which formed the backbone of many scenes. Effects like these, that would normally be simulated separately, could be built and adjusted live and directly on the screen. And because this technology renders in real time, the team could see the lit, textured and final-look shots as they worked, as you would see your own physical world, rather than working hours or days for a render to come back.
This real-time feedback loop is what transformed the game for Charuvi Design Labs. It let the studio execute their vision on a level a live-action movie director would, by adjusting the shot, seeing the result immediately and tweaking it again. This matters especially for a delicate story like Narasimha, built around a child’s fear and a father’s cruelty, where the emotional register had to be precise and communicated in a kid-friendly tone.
The most liberating aspect about a tool like Unreal Engine is not only the creative freedom it grants, but the ability to see the questions you ask while ideating the film, finally getting answered. The team asked questions like ‘what does it feel like to be that child?’ or ‘how does something this flat, this stylized, become animation?.’ Unreal Engine answered both.
Unreal Engine’s technology also allows creative teams to recreate a sense of nostalgia. In one scene in Narasimha Awakens, the camera moves inside Prahlad’s mouth to reveal a glimpse of a cosmic space. We also see this moment in Lord Krishna’s story where he opens his mouth to reveal the entire universe within—a scene that has been reimagined many times across the epic’s various remakes.
In a landscape of Indian cinema that has become increasingly notorious for remakes, using Unreal Engine to invest in original animation and revive these mythological stories steers teams away from executing someone else’s vision, and enables them to build from scratch something they actually believe in.
Narasimha is the latest entry in the expansive body of work that Charuvi Design Labs have produced for over a decade. The studio's earliest projects include The Legend of Hanuman, a 3D animated series for Disney+ Hotstar that reimagined Hanuman’s origin story and Legends of the Ramayana with Amish, made in collaboration with author Amish Tripathi. The studio has also produced Dastaan-E-Shahadat, an anthology on the life of Guru Gobind Singh, and immersive installations, including projection-mapped experiences at heritage sites. Beyond mythology and culture, Charuvi Design Labs has also worked with organisations like UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Narasimha Awakens: The Legend of Prahlad bagged a bronze at the 47th Annual Telly Awards’ general animation category, a recognition that signals the hopeful state of the potential of Indian animation and one that lands at a critical moment for the broader industry. While outsourced work still forms the backbone of India’s animation industry, a growing number of studios are beginning to invest in original IPs alongside commissioned work, and Charuvi Design Labs’ use of Unreal Engine on this project is a notable example of what this shift can look like in practise.
“Unreal Engine is a tool. But in the right hands, a tool changes what's possible.” says Vikram Verma, the Technical Head at Charuvi Design Labs.