Baahubali is a cinematic gift that keeps on giving. After Baahubali: The Epic opened in theatres this October, 2027 will bring Baahubali: The Eternal War Part 1. The animated epic will take off from S S Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning’s climax (2015) and follow Prabhas’s Amarendra into the afterlife.

Ishan Shukla, who is helming the two-part animated feature that will have Prabhas and Ramya Krishnan voice the two primary characters, says the idea came from Rajamouli and producer Shobu Yarlagadda almost two years ago. At the time, Shukla was doing festival rounds with his animation film, Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust (2024).

“The Star Wars episode that I had done had also come out. Shobu got in touch with me and wanted to explore if we could do something together on Baahubali. At that time, I wasn’t sure if I was capable of doing something huge like that,” he recounts.

Shukla found the confidence to lead this ambitious project in the most unlikely place — in his eight-year-old self. “I had the largest collection of Amar Chitra Katha in my community. I thought maybe I could do something for that eight-year-old self,” smiles the director.

The Amar Chitra Katha stories and their grammar gave him the foundation for the feature. “I wanted to justify the use of animation. So, I came up with the idea of the afterlife, and included Vedic cosmology.”

For world-building and characters, he also found inspiration from Telugu cinema of the 1960s and 70s. “We referred to the mythological film Maya Bazaar [1957]. The idea was to start from a point of authenticity, and then layer it with contemporary stylization, something like the series, Arcane, or the Spider-Verse.”

In the course of making The Eternal War, Shukla met Rajamouli many times over. Ask him his biggest learning from the ace director, and he says, “As visual artists, we think that we can make something look cool with action, music, production design. All that is secondary to him. He always focuses on the drama, the emotions, and the internal conflicts of the characters.”