Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama and its fraught history of birth and rebirth [Video]

Few pop-cultural artifacts possess the cross-cultural resonance of Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama.

The Sanskrit epic Ramayana has long served as the country’s guiding star, endlessly reinterpreted to suit the shifting tides of its storytellers. But for millennials and Gen Xers, whose moral compasses got shaped by Sunday mornings spent glued to Cartoon Network and the last gasps of Doordarshan reruns, Yugo Sako’s animated adaptation occupies an entirely different space, slotted neatly in between Scooby-Doo mysteries, Shaktimaan episodes and other figments of childhood nostalgia. 

The Indo-Japanese anime collaboration that first graced Indian screens in the early 1990s has lingered in the collective consciousness, partly for just how pretty it looks and partly for the sheer audacity of its creation. It has since weathered storms of misunderstanding, political controversy, and technological evolution to reemerge three decades later in dazzling 4K glory on Indian screens. For a story that traverses cosmic battles and moral dilemmas, the film’s own journey back to the Indian box office …