The Japanese Man Who Dared to Animate the Ramayana
It took Yugo Sako’s team 10 years to hand-draw the sacred Indian epic. The result was stunning and too controversial to screen widely — until now.
“Let us build the bridge,” Ram declares in Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Ram (1993), raising his fist in the air. Monkeys begin carrying rocks as they march from the forest to the edge of the ocean. They enlist deer, birds, and even elephants to reach the roughly 883 miles to Lanka, the island where King Ravan holds Sita, Ram’s wife, captive.
This scene would be difficult in any film to portray without ample special effects — not to mention the flying chariots, vicious rakshasas, and a soaring Hanuman that make up key parts of the story. That might be why one filmmaker decided to animate it in a gorgeous hand-drawn movie that Indian theaters never screened — until this year. And it was one unlikely man who created it: Yugo Sako, a Japanese documentarian obsessed with Valmiki’s Ramayana.