Where has all the children’s cinema gone?

At the BAFTAs in February, Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, a small Manipuri film about a young, mischievous boy’s search for his father, inched past studio behemoths Zootopia 2 and Lilo & Stitch and bagged the award for Best Children’s and Family Film—the first ever Indian film to win in the category.

The decision to submit Boong to the BAFTAs under the “Children’s and Family Film” category was a strategic choice by the film producer. Devi, while clarifying that her film is not a “children’s film”, just one which happens to have a child protagonist, conceded to “a lack of films for children in India”, a lack that Boong, without explicitly intending to, plugged.

This lack has been glaring, given minors make up more than a third of the country’s population, with roughly 25% under the age of 14. While post-liberalisation, animation shows grew as a cottage industry catering primarily to children, live-action films, despite brief spurts in the 2000s and 2010s, has dwindled to a drip.

So, where are the films made for children?

THE CFSI YEARS

In 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), one of the world’s first organisations dedicated entirely to the production of films for children. The mandate was clear: children are the future, and any nation that takes its future seriously, must take its children seriously too. The National Film Awards even had a category for “Best Children’s Film” from its very first edition in 1954.

Housed under the ministry of information and broadcasting, CFSI has produced over 250 feature films, shorts, animation, documentaries and television episodes in 10 languages, aimed at “helping children grow and imbibe the values of this new nation,” says Monica Wahi, children’s film programmer and former creative head at CFSI.

Stalwart filmmakers were roped in to make films for CFSI—Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s Eid Mubarak (1960), Mrinal Sen’s Ichhapuran (1970), M.S. Sathyu’s Kala Parvat (1970), Shyam Benegal’s Charandas Chor (1975), Sai Paranjpye’s Sikandar (1976), Tapan Sinha’s Sabuj Dwiper Raja (1979), herpetologist and conservationist Romulus Whitaker’s The Boy and the Crocodile (1989), Rituparno Ghosh’s Hirer Angti (1992), and Jahnu Barua’s Tora (2003). These films foregrounded children’s perspective and curiosity, without resorting to infantilising them or recasting their innocence as ignorance.

“CFSI films were shown to about 7 million students a year in the early 2010s. Growing up in the 1980s, we were taken by our schools to watch CFSI films,” Wahi says. Usually made on a budget of around ₹1.5 crore, CFSI films didn’t have commercial releases in the conventional sense, but were shown widely, through district education officers, private schools, and non-governmental organisations, with some local agents travelling across the country with projectors.

Actor Nandita Das, CFSI chairperson from 2009-12, says of her tenure, “One significant milestone was the release of Gattu (2011), the first CFSI-produced film to be theatrically released in the organisation’s history of over 55 years and 250 films. I had hoped this would set a precedent for the future.”

Children were brought in to watch films during the empty morning slots, and tickets were priced at ₹70, with revenue being shared equally by CFSI and PVR Cinemas. This was a limited release, in six theatres, a format they also followed with Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya (2013), a Hindi animated film based on Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), which Ray made not only because he wanted to make cinema for children but also because of his son’s insistence that he move away from the “grim and adult” cinema he was known for.

Like most government schemes, CFSI films weren’t aimed at profitability, and thus, unamenable to the movie market. Filmmaker and film historian Vijaya Mulay in her 1981 essay, Where are the Children’s Films?, argued that these films merely reached 0.6% of the 246 million children, skewing towards urban centres. She also took issue with the didactic nature of some of the films.

“Distribution poses (a) major challenge. Despite children forming a huge audience base, distributors prefer the so-called ‘family entertainers’ over films made specifically for children,” Das says.

For example, in the 1970s, there were commercial Hindi films like M. A. Thirumugam’s Haathi Mere Saathi (1971), Ravikant Nagaich’s Rani Aur Lalpari (1975), and Tapan Sinha’s Safed Haathi (1977). But as film and television historian Noel Brown writes in his 2015 essay, A Brief History of Indian Children’s Cinema, they “were clearly intended for mass audiences and were highly popular… These films abided by the formal conventions of Bollywood cinema. They also benefited from stronger distribution than their CFSI counterparts, but, most importantly, their emphasis is on evoking pleasure, rather than instilling moral fibre.”

IMPORTING ANIMATION

India’s experiments with animation, post independence, never reached the commercial profitability and soft power of Korea, Japan, or the US. The chokehold of foreign animation, then, was inevitable, a grip that has barely loosened since.

With the advent of cable TV, there was suddenly a lot of foreign animation on television, with new channels mushrooming—first Cartoon Network in 1995 and Nickelodeon in 1999, dubbing their shows in Hindi, and later more local languages; then, came Pogo in 2004, and Discovery Kids (India) in 2012. The impression that animation in India is an infantilised genre of storytelling to be consumed by and catered to kids stuck, with animation often referred to as “cartoons”.

In the 2000s, there was a desire to tap into animation’s theatrical prospects. The success of the first Hanuman in 2005 made Mumbai-based Percept Picture Company churn out sequels—one even directed by Anurag Kashyap. Behemoth production houses which became synonymous with the grand traditions of Hindi cinema—Yash Raj Films and Dharma Productions—were also trying to stake their claim to this fresh pie. However, this experiment faltered: Subsequent Hanuman films were commercial failures, as was Yash Raj Films’ Roadside Romeo (2008).

“Even Chhota Bheem, despite being a huge success on television, was not able to translate it into theatrical footfalls. We should know what needs to go where,” Ashish Thapar, CEO of HiTech Animation Studios, the studio behind Kurukshetra, the first mythological anime from Netflix India, told The Hollywood Reporter India in 2025.

That space was taken over by international animation films from Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar. The Lion King (2019), for example, earned over ₹180 crore in India, and Mufasa: The Lion King (2024), over ₹160 crore. Even Japanese anime has had successful runs, with Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba—The Movie: Infinity Castle (2024) earning around ₹90 crore. In 2025, Reliance Entertainment brought the anime franchise Naruto to Indian theatres.

“We see kids going to the theatre, but unfortunately, they are not going for Indian content. Disney films and anime from East are being consumed in significantly large numbers. I believe there is a huge appetite for animation content to come out of India,” says distributor Akshaye Rathi.

Indian animation became limited almost exclusively to television and, later, streaming. In the years leading up to and during the pandemic, streaming platforms diversified their slate to include animation: VOOT Kids, Zee5 Kids, and MyToonz. On TV, Sony YAY! and ETV Bal Bharat increased their mandate.

In 2025, however, the success of the mythological animation film Mahavatar Narsimha opened a new door. Made on a ₹40-crore budget, the film earned over ₹300 crore at the box office, a feat it managed by expanding the scope of animation’s target audience. The film was not only violent, it began with an erotic scene, immediately announcing its intentions—this is not a children’s film (it was certified U/A, a film that required parental guidance).

The announcement in 2025 of animation films like Baahubali: The Eternal War, with a ₹120-crore budget, making it one of the most expensive animation films, and Choti Stree, a Stree animated spinoff, is testament to a reckoning that animation is no longer just for children. Stree actress Shraddha Kapoor emphasised at a public event, “Choti Stree…will release in theatres for all age groups.”

So even as animation found a foothold in India, children are, increasingly, not seen as the target audience for its commercial release. For the kids, there is always—and only—cartoons.

BEYOND BOLLYWOOD

In the 2000s, Hindi cinema made small strides in live-action children’s films, flirting with horror in Makdee (2002), the first film by Vishal Bhardwaj, and Bhoothnath (2008), fantasy and sci-fi in Raju Chacha (2000) and Jajantaram Mamantaram (2003), or even sweet moral fables like My Blue Umbrella (2005), also by Bhardwaj, based on a Ruskin Bond novella. These sank theatrically, but had an afterlife on television.

Outside the behemoth of Hindi cinema, however, children’s films were marking their presence. Marathi films with child protagonists prodded bleak questions around disability, grief, and caste: Shwaas (2004), Tingya (2008), Fandry (2013), and Killa (2015). Some, like Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni’s riotous Valu (2008), about a misunderstood wild bull that sows chaos in a village, were commercially successful, and Shwaas, about a young boy with retinal cancer, became India’s official entry to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In Tamil Nadu, the witty Kaaka Muttai (2014), following two slum children’s pursuit of having a pizza, earned ₹12 crore at the box office. Unafraid of seeming harmless and cute, these films took head-on complicated socioeconomic strands of thought, which, through wit or rage, they made charming, probing, and, ultimately, hopeful.

“It was a mahaul (environment) where these films were working in theatres, so we were able to organise money to make more of them,” Kulkarni says of the work that happened in Marathi cinema. Soon, though, the mind-set of the industry took a hairpin bend.

“Suddenly, in the 2010s, only big films started working, and the ‘ ₹100-crore film’ came on the skyline. Then, that is only what people were interested in. Slowly, the desire for children’s films went away,” Kulkarni adds. These films that bring in crores also required producers to pump in crores—for not just the making, but marketing, too.

Scratches of initiative at the periphery kept the viewing, if not the making, of children’s film alive. Kulkarni helped organise a Children’s Film Club in Pune at the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) before the pandemic, hosting packed monthly screenings, including post-screening conversations with the kids. For example, they would invite a scientist after a sci-fi film, “to introduce children to other kinds of heroes,” Kulkarni notes, though after running it for four years, the club tapered off.

“Kids stopped coming to watch films in theatres. People got used to watching content on their phones.”

The squandered promise of children’s cinema remains. “The amount of films that are made for children globally are great, whereas in India the children don’t even get to see those films, forget about us getting to make our own films,” Kulkarni says.

NO SPACE FOR SMALL FILMS

This is part of the larger disappearance of the small and mid-budget film, exacerbated post pandemic, where theatrical footfalls were linked entirely to tent-pole films. Besides, the steep rise of ticket prices made multiplex cinema halls a luxury outing that can be afforded but a few times a year. Just between 2020-25, cinema ticket prices in India rose by 47%, according to the Ormax Media Box Office Report, in continuation of a two-decade long swell.

During this period, it was not just the entry price to the film that changed; the kinds of films, too, swerved radically. The “family film”, for example, one you could take your child to, has taken a hit. Using the 18,000 films that were certified between 2017-25, CBFC Watch described a shift: where only 12% of the Hindi movies were certified (U) or unrestricted for all ages, with a larger 78% being certified (UA). In 2009, almost 50% of the films were U-rated. With the family film dwindling, and a barren landscape for children’s live-action films, all that remains is animation.

“Apart from the CFSI’s vision, the Indian film industry has never had the vision to produce films primarily for children, as opposed to Europe, particularly Scandinavian countries, which make films catering specifically to an audience of kids—both privately and publicly funded,” Wahi says. Film festivals like the Berlinale have two separate categories for children’s films—Generation Kplus and Generation 14plus. Generation Kplus films are even dubbed in German for the school kids who pack the theatres.

India, at best, offers subsidies, with various state governments having separate policies—but these are for completed films.

The CFSI-run International Children’s Film Festival, also called The Golden Elephant, which was held every alternate year since 1995, shut down in 2019. The CFSI’s mandate also dwindled, and it was eventually subsumed under the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in 2022. The CFSI website that housed the roster of films is no longer accessible. NGOs have written to NFDC about possible future editions of The Golden Elephant, and have not received any responses. Lounge reached out to the NFDC managing director, but repeated texts and email did not elicit a response.

In the absence of government infrastructure or even industry support, the independent film circuit is the remaining avenue. Films like Rima Das’ Village Rockstars (2017), Manohara K’s Bird of a Different Feather (2024) and Anoop Lokkur’s Don’t Tell Mother (2025), coming-of-age films with child protagonists, make rounds of festivals, and are shown in the children’s film section at the Dharamshala International Film Festival, Bulbul Children’s International Film Festival in Goa, CHINH International Film Festival in Delhi, and the Kolkata International Children’s Film Festival. Post that they languish into oblivion, rarely picked up by streaming platforms. Village Rockstars, which was on Netflix from 2020-25, is an exception.

Filmmakers are attempting to build alternative paths by doubling up as entrepreneurs. Nila Madhab Panda, who has made children’s films like I Am Kalam (2010) and Jalpari (2012), describes the effort it takes to get your film seen: “For I Am Kalam we worked with Smile Foundation who aggressively reached out to schools. Then, if one school used a film, it multiplied into hundreds.”

Amole Gupte, too, tapped into the school ecosystem to reach a wider audience for Stanley Ka Dabba (2011), while others like Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas Bahl of Chillar Party (2011) milked the star cameo of Ranbir Kapoor to push the film. A new distribution strategy that targets schools and can be tapped into by a robust ecosystem of children’s cinema is, perhaps, the need of the hour.

“While economics often dictated creative decisions in India, I strongly believe that it is possible to make budget-friendly children’s films that are engaging, value-driven and entertaining without being patronising,” Nandita Das says. But the gulf between the belief and its realisation only seems to be widening.

That gulf, instead, is plugged by video games, YouTube, and streaming. In a 2024 study, Kidscan India Report by market research company Kantar, that surveyed 2,500 children between the ages of 5-14, saw an increased consumption of online videos, what they called “digital recreational experiences” i.e. video games.

For decades, the paucity of cinema for children in India was filled by the larger “family film”. This continued in the 1990s and 2000s with films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Lagaan (2001), and Krrish (2006), among others—a profitable category of clean cinema, without gruesome violence or sex. But in today’s Indian cinema, largely driven by violent spectacle, there’s much less that kids can, or should, watch in theatres—a void filled by foreign animation and more sanitised Hollywood tentpoles.

The disappearance of films for children is, in some sense, the disappearance of the Nehruvian vision. They have been flung into an easy, profitable solution to a thorny, and perhaps, patronising question—what do we want our children to see?

Boong’s release was, as distributor Akshaye Rathi notes, “a niche phenomenon. It needs to be done with consistency if the genre needs to pick up.” That is only if we want the genre to pick up. A big, confounding if.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a Mumbai-based journalist and author.