It was already 10 ‘o’ clock at night by the time I wrapped up my conversation with Aziz Jindani. More than three hours had gone by and we both ended up missing appointments. Jindani’s personal journey, and his reasons to get into filmmaking, had ended up being far more involving than most motion pictures.

Jindani is the director, producer and writer of The Donkey King (DK) — an animated film whose premise is literally encapsulated in the title (a ‘donkey’ becomes ‘king’). Unlike other filmmakers (or maybe like every other Pakistani filmmaker), Jindani knows little about the technicalities of screenwriting, or direction. Things just came together like he envisioned, he tells me. It’s probably because he has a very talented director of animation, he adds later.

As the co-creator of Commander Safeguard, this isn’t Jindani’s first animated venture. That benchmark-setting idea was the property of Procter & Gamble, where he had worked for 18 years in key executive positions.

“As a storytelling opportunity I felt I should try a language where I have experience,” he says. “In 3D, you can tell stories where humans are handicapped at times. Like this particular story, which cannot be told in a tasteful way, if it is in a non-animated format.”

Aziz Jindani says he was very precise on what he wanted to accomplish with The Donkey King

Jindani is very precise on what he wanted to accomplish, especially in an emerging film market such as Pakistan.

“From a market standpoint I tend to argue that family entertainers in general have much bigger audiences and, therefore, to judge the potential of an animated film’s appeal through existing benchmarks is perhaps a bit myopic in my opinion,” he says.

“I am not saying that DK can be the highest-grossing film in Pakistan, but I see no reason why an animated film that appeals to an entire family couldn’t end up among the top five or top seven grossing films of the year.”

At times during the conversation, I felt that his approach to developing the story was inspired from the Hollywood standard — without, of course, the difficulties of dealing with studio executive oversight.

In a way DK is a studio film; the intellectual rights belongs to Jindani and the film is partially bankrolled by Geo Films.

Jindani would clear up most of my doubts on making a Hollywood-like film later in the evening, when he impulsively started talking about film structures and act breaks, and how he tried to stick to those conventions.

He believes that, like Coco, Pakistani animated films should have deep-rooted but familiar themes.

“Donkey has been used as a double entendre, because the word is used both as an insult and a label for somebody who is considered dumb. It is an ‘underdonkey’ story [a play on the word underdog] where a guy goes on to prove to the world that, despite being born a donkey, he refuses to live and die like one. At its heart it’s a story of overcoming one’s limitations, despite the handicaps one is born with.”

Incidentally, the theatrical trailer of DK had been released while I had waited for Jindani that evening. Even in two-minute form, one can sense the plots’ socio-political perspective. A lion, who also happens to be king, gives up his monarchy to appease the kingdom’s demand for democracy — ergo, the Donkey King scenario.

Afzal ‘Jan Rambo’ Khan, Ghulam Mohiuddin, Javed Sheikh, Ahsan Rahim, Faisal Qureshi, Ismail Tara, Hina Dilpazir, Shabbir Jan, Adeel Hashmi, Mani, Irfan Malik and Ali Hassan populate the voices of this particular animal kingdom.

A few days later, the cast would gather at Studio 146 for a promotional song’s shoot. One look at the congregated star cast and you knew exactly who played whom in this particular Zootopia.

Jindani tells me that the development of characters and the film’s casting was a parallel process. “For every character, we only had few choices. I personally cannot think of alternatives. There were some characters where people could be switched — for example, Mani and Faisal Qureshi perhaps could have switched from each other — but I felt that Mani was the better choice.” (Mani plays a conniving lizard and Qureshi plays a reporter monkey).

Afzal Khan — better known for his reinterpretation of Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo — is, of course, the lead gadha (donkey) of the story. Khan seemed genuinely happy on getting the opportunity to lead this film; in fact, he is glad that he didn’t sign the other four or five films he had been offered in the last few years.

“I think the first imagery I had in my mind was Rangeela sahib because I had seen Insan Aur Gadha,” Jindani tells me. “It was exactly the Mangu we wanted — somebody who is spontaneous, rustic and a kid at heart. He would have been ideal casting if we were making this film 40 years ago. The next person that came to my mind was Rambo. There wasn’t much rocket science to it than that. When I recorded him on day one it was very clear to me that Rangeela’s acting spirit has been passed on to Rambo. In fact, he himself confesses to it.”

As I spoke with actors I learned that some had difficulty remembering their character’s names. Nonetheless, there was unanimity on the specifics Jindani had briefed them on, and the freedom they had on reinterpreting their dialogues when needed.

While dialogues were tinkered with, the script wasn’t. In fact, the animatic (a visual storyboard, edited like a movie) and the timing of performances were perfected before the animation went into production, effectively bringing down the time it took to produce the film.

“This is a film for children and the children at heart, made by people who refuse to grow up, including myself,” Jindani concludes.

“That childlike innocence and naivety got me into making DK,” he said. “My ignorance of realities and of how local films are made and how they do business was a blessing in disguise. If I was calculated about it then I would never have been able to make this film.”

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 7th, 2018