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The story of how Wingstar came to be is heartwarming.
Rather than an idea discussed on a round-table, Zebu Animation Studios' decision to create Wingstar came from the director’s daughter, whose curiosity helped narrow the gap many filmmakers have left open in the Indian animation landscape. Director Veerendra Patil’s daughter asked him “Dad, can we do Wingstar?” upon asking why, she replied “Because I’ve never seen a superhero from India.”
For most of the Indian audience, the first tryst with homegrown stories didn’t come from a screen at all. It came from sources like the Tinkle comics or the Amar Chitra Katha comics, from characters like Shikari Shambu or Supandi or stories of Hanuman, Krishna and Rama that children quickly befriended. In an age without smartphones, iPads and laptops, these tales were pretty much the only door into an entirely different reality, full of innocence, imagination and friendships beyond their own. Much of that intimacy also came with the way stories were passed down, as they were either read aloud or consumed through physical books. While that kind of a connection is difficult to manufacture on screen, it isn’t impossible — especially when the gap between intent and technology is filled.
This is what Zebu Animation Studios has achieved through Wingstar. The film doesn’t try to force a clean break from old comics to new-age animation, instead, it aims to carry that lineage forward for a new generation. The film is inspired by Mapui, the 13-year old girl superhero created by Tinkle comics whose alter ego is Wingstar. So, in a sense, the studio isn’t inventing a superhero out of nowhere. Rather, it is picking up a character kids already knew and loved growing up and giving her a new form for a generation that is increasingly detaching themselves from reading comics, but still want the same connection with it.
Creating animation for today’s kids isn’t just about swapping formats or screens for storybooks. It means accepting the way children perceive stories, the reality they wish to see for themselves, and building for it rather than on what worked for the generations that came before them.
From the outset, the studio wanted Wingstar to confront real issues, which also shaped Patil’s creative vision of giving the film a dark, neo-noir style narrative — a departure from the sanitised tone many animation films for children adopt.
While the film is set to arrive in 2027, it will arrive at a pivotal moment in Indian animation with the VFX industry now valued over a billion dollars and expected to rise gradually in the coming years. Zebu created Wingstar with the understanding of this, and the fact that there is a real desire for animation ranging from mythological epics to the reimagination of former characters. Now, there are tools that have also finally caught up with this ambition.
For Zebu, that tool was Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. The studio used real time features such as Lumen, its global illumination system, Nanite, its virtualized geometry system, Movie Render Graph and its Live Motion Capture to see real time output within Unreal Engine.
Patil had spent a week in Aizwal, Mizoram, to observe the forests there and gauge the movement of light within them at night. To replicate this on screen, the team used Unreal Engine to build the forest procedurally inside it through a process called Procedural Content Generation (PCG) which essentially gives the engine a set of rules to create visuals that feel alive instead of assembled.
The team also used Lumen to calculate how light moved and bounced through various scenes in the film and Nanite to ensure no on-screen detail had to be compromised for performance. The Movie Render Graph tool automated complex, multi-layered cinematic renders across multiple shots simultaneously, turning what once took two days into a five-minute task. On a production as demanding as an animated feature, the time saved made room to further refine the work as Unreal Engine more than halved the time it would take in traditional pipelines.
With a tight production timeline, the studio also leaned on Live Motion Capture that allowed the animator and the animation director to see real-time results inside the Unreal Engine editor. Facial animation was the harder piece of the puzzle to solve and introduce into the pipeline. But, with the use of MetaHuman and using an iPhone rigged for mocap, the team could capture multiple facial performances across multiple characters and shots, in a single day.
“Can we ever come closer to live-action filmmakers and focus on storytelling rather than pondering over how to make a pixel?,” is a question Patil asked during the initial phases of creating the film, which also speaks a lot about Zebu’s larger vision and where it sees itself today and in the future.
Zebu Animation Studios has created 64 shows over the last five years, output that would typically demand a much larger team. Unreal Engine has been central to that scale — and now, the same technology is empowering Indian animation studios to build their own original IP alongside the work they have long delivered for others. Creativity was never the issue. And while the means were previously limited, Unreal Engine 5 closes that gap.
“India has always had the stories and the talent. What it did not have was the tool that let you move at the speed of the idea. What Zebu has built is not just a film. It's proof of what Indian animation can be,” says Patil.