Imagine, the little one of the family is up for some leisure activities-- watching a cartoon or an animated series seems to be a great option, right? Then again, blaming the little ones for gluing their eyes to Indian, American or Japanese cartoon channels not a great idea, isn't it? Why not we, the adults, try to make a checklist of the options for the kids to watch Bengali cartoon?
Kids today can get themselves thoroughly exposed to the world in the easiest possible ways. Television or internet being available in almost every house happens to be their most easily accessible options. Even if the kid is too young to get his/her hands on the TV remote or the keyboard, the parents or the elder siblings will not mind making him/her sit to enjoy an adorable cartoon series.
Very soon, even before being able to count from zero to twenty, the kids will have the numbers of the favourite cartoon channels copy-pasted in their tiny brains. The common options available for Bengali kids are-- Cartoon Network, Nick and sometimes Pogo. Kids being very uncritical eventually take these channels to be their own without even having any knowledge of that foreign language! But imagine how wonderful it would have been to have a cartoon channel in their very mother tongue with contents they could relate to.
Certainly, we already have extraordinary creations like Meena-Raju, Thakurmar Jhuli and Sisimpur to proceed with. But the reason behind its decreasing fandom lies within its inability to compete with the growing world class animations. A world class storyline, with rich content that today's kids can easily relate themselves to, is bound to gain their attention.
However, another most important factor in this sector is marketing. The magic spell of marketing along with advertisements have made cartoons like Doraemon, Pokemon, Power Puff Girls, Ben10, Motu-Patlu, etc gain huge popularity. As the innocent kids are ever-ready to love and admire all the characters of the cartoon world-- what's better than having the figures of their favourite cartoon character on top of their pencil box or school bag?
Besides, it is very important to improve with time in order to hold the fan-base. In this context, young cartoonist Sadman Mustasir brings in the example of how Japan maintained its cartoon fandom and says "The father of manga Tezuka is the one who made anime what it is now. He made Astroboy which gained a huge audience-- mostly kids. But he did not want to lose the fan-base and so as the audience grew in age, the story of Astroboy also matured. Eventually, Japan got a grown up cartoon loving generation."
On the other hand, internet and various online channels have already gained popularity in Bangladesh. Bangla being a very rich language has a huge treasure of Bengali rhymes which are also available online. Bengali cartoon characters can be easily used in making animations for these rhymes. Often we come across such animations in YouTube but the quality being dissatisfying fails to attract the little ones. Thus, even if we ask the kids to watch these, there arises a comparison with the world-class animations and they end up choosing the better even if they do not understand a single word.
It is basically the animators, cartoonists and producers who have to play the most vital role in this sector. Though it is unfortunate that animation studies have not gained popularity here in our country yet, we do have a lot to give and explore.
Few ideas and inspirations can be taken from foreign ones only to make ours ones better. At present, few Bengali channels are seen to telecast foreign cartoon using Bengali dubs. Apparently, this might seem to be a good option for diverting our kids into watching Bengali channels but cannot hold their interest for long as they already have the idea of what one might call-- world class cartoon.
The cartoon loving kids of our country are ever-ready to fly to their fantasy world on the back of more amazing characters like Meena and Raju with a 24/7 cartoon channel of their own.
The writer is studying at Department
of English, Jahangirnagar University
