India's animation and visual effects sector has spent most of its life rendering other people's films. The latest figures show a business large enough to matter, fragile enough to wobble when global production stalls, and increasingly determined to own what it makes.
The roots run deep. In 1956 Disney animator Clair Weeks, who had worked on Bambi, was invited to the Films Division of India in Mumbai to set up and train the country's first animation studio as part of an American technical cooperation mission. The core group he trained produced The Banyan Deer in 1957, and veteran animator Ram Mohan began his career at the Films Division Cartoon Unit.
Landmarks followed slowly. The Films Division short Ek Anek Aur Ekta, a traditionally animated educational film about unity, was released in 1974 and aired widely on Doordarshan. The first Indian animated television series, Ghayab Aaya, arrived in 1986, directed by Suddhasattwa Basu, while early 3D and VFX work appeared on the series Captain Vyom. The first Indian 3D animated feature, Roadside Romeo, came in 2008 as a Yash Raj Films and Walt Disney Company India venture.
For decades the commercial engine was outsourcing. The industry was tapped largely by North American film and television producers who were ready to send animation work to studios across Asia and the Pacific Rim, with Indian houses handling bulk 2D and, later, 3D content. Mumbai, Chennai, Trivandrum, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bangalore became the major studio hubs.
The most authoritative current numbers come from the FICCI-EY media and entertainment report released in March 2025. It put India's overall media and entertainment sector at about 2.5 trillion rupees, roughly 29.4 billion dollars, in 2024, a rise of 3.3 per cent and roughly 0.73 per cent of India's GDP. Growth had slowed sharply from 8.3 per cent in 2023.
The animation-specific picture was tougher. According to the same report, the animation, VFX and post-production segment contracted by nine per cent to reach about 103 billion rupees in 2024, with the VFX segment alone declining 14 per cent. The report tied the fall to a global reset in production volumes, lingering effects of the 2023 strikes, and OTT platforms reining in content spending, all of which cut the volume of international VFX projects outsourced to India.
Domestic work softened the blow. While global VFX demand fell, the report noted that the Indian market kept studios active, citing large domestic projects such as the 1,200 VFX shots done for Heeramandi and more than 3,500 shots for Fighter, with high-budget Indian films now allocating up to 30 per cent of their budgets to VFX. The report forecasts the segment recovering to about 147 billion rupees by 2027.
Policy is trying to push the sector up the value chain. Industry bodies have framed a National AVGC policy aimed at helping transform Indian media and entertainment into a major global industry, while groups now explicitly treat Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics, the AVGC cluster, as a single creative economy.
The strategic question, recurring across the data, is the shift from service to ownership. Studios like Green Gold with Chhota Bheem, and comics-led producers like Graphic India with The Legend of Hanuman, represent the original-IP path, betting that owning characters across comics, television, film and streaming is more durable than rendering shots for foreign clients project by project.
Reported from the FICCI-EY 2025 media and entertainment report and Wikipedia.
