Bal Ganesh 2 (animation)

How do you make mythology relevant and interesting for today’s media-saturated kids? Even children with no access to cable or satellite TV get enough slick animation through the day,and most of these cartoon characters are pure,unbridled fun. What they don’t need is another cute little god with another cute little companion,trying very hard to be cool.

‘Bal Ganesh 2’ tells you both how far we’ve got from the bad old days of uni-dimensional line drawings (quite a welcome distance),and how far we still need to go in keeping both content and treatment safe from home-grown homilies (that horizon is very distant),and how we still haven’t managed to get rid of language that doesn’t belong to this generation.

Both the little Ganesha and his pal Mooshak,leaping upon a pile of ‘modaks’,are quite sweet. So are the mice who gather to recount their stories,singing a little rap number. Ganesh becomes ‘sab-ka-pyaara Gannu’. That’s a nice touch. But his mother is standard procedure goddess-mom,full of little homilies,prompting a bowing of the head and the archaic phrase “koti koti pranaam”.

You hear and you tune out.