The Best Ramayana Movie Is Actually a ’90s Anime

For a religious epic as defining as the Ramayana, there are few definitive adaptations out of the Indian subcontinent, where it originated in the first millennium BCE. There was a beloved low-budget TV version broadcast nationally in India in the late 1980s, which starred actor Arun Govil in the lead role of the benevolent prince Rama. There have been many other attempts, including a poorly received 2023 Bollywood version called Adipurush. But Nitesh Tiwari’s new blockbuster Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is the most ambitious adaptation yet, a $400 million two-part saga whose first film isn’t very good.

As holds true with most live-action adaptations, the anime was better.

Completed in 1993, Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama is technically a co-production between India and Japan, but it was directed and produced by Japanese filmmaker Yugo Sako, who developed a fascination with Hindu mythology after visiting India in the 1970s. A decade later, while working on a documentary about the controversial excavation of alleged “Ramayana relics,” he began his nearly decade-long journey to complete the animated film, though not before the Vishva Hindu Parishad (a right-wing Hindutva organization) objected to Sako’s passion project on the basis of an outsider doing disservice to revered Hindu deities by depicting them in cartoon form (people have eased up on this; there have since been animated religious stories aplenty). This tumult forced Sako to complete the movie in Japan. It wouldn’t receive a wide release in India until its 4K rerelease in 2025.

By then, two major versions of the film had already become popular in India on home video and Cartoon Network: the original English dub with Indian voice actors and a subsequent Hindi version screened in a handful of Indian theaters in 1997, in which Govil reprised his popular role, and which featured perennial Bollywood bad guy Amrish Puri as the demon king Ravana. A shorter English version was produced for American audiences in 2001 and titled The Prince of Light; it featured voice performances from James Earl Jones as the narrator and Bryan Cranston as Rama. However, this version received only a limited theatrical release in the U.S. and, apart from a trailer on YouTube, is largely considered lost.

However, the original English version remains available on the movie’s official YouTube page (the 4K version, completed in 2022, isn’t hard to find either, if you know which internet archives to peruse). The resplendent anime film, co-directed by Koichi Sasaki and Indian animator Ram Mohan, condenses the sprawling epic into just over two hours, simplifying it for younger viewers while still maintaining its violence and grandeur. Its vivid hues and distinct character color-coding make it easy for viewers to keep track of its sprawling ensemble, while it tells the story of Rama’s exile from his kingdom alongside his courageous brother Lakshmana and the subsequent war to retrieve his graceful wife, Sita, from Ravana’s clutches.

Filled with winged and multi-armed demons, the anime achieves what Tiwari’s two-parter isn’t able to in its first three hours of runtime (the second half is slated to arrive next year). Which is to say, it’s told with dramatic clarity. The music, by Indian New Wave maestro Vanraj Bhatia, ranges from wordless compositions that distill drama and action, to songs of devotion steeped in age-old musical traditions. Although the movie zips through events as if on fast-forward (it’s a lot of ground to cover), it feels emotionally and visually complete.

It also has some glaring discomforts, though these aren’t so much flaws of adaptation as they are features of the source material. Plenty of other versions shy away from the caste aspect of the story, but this version of Rama repeatedly mentions belonging to the Kshatriya or warrior caste, which informs the violent actions inherent to his dharma, or sacred duty. Similarly, many tribal soldiers of lower status die on Rama’s behalf, and for the most part, they’re expected to. The film is by no means an interrogation of this hierarchy or its implications, but it makes explicit elements of Hindu tradition which go unsaid in other adaptations.

Regardless, the movie’s litany of fantastical demons, and its anthropomorphic animal heroes, remain an audiovisual delight. The transitions from scene to scene aren’t particularly elegant (one gets the sense that it may have been intended to play with commercial breaks in between), but the story moves swiftly, with a momentous sweep befitting of the original epic. It outshines the new movie Rise of a Legend in more ways than one. Its characters’ motives are clearer — the demons, for instance, are impishly violent; the live-action movie forgets to have most of them do any harm before they’re slain. It also grants those characters (both heroes and villains alike) fluid expressiveness in moments of grief and anguish, and makes Rama physically vulnerable, in contrast to the way Rise of a Legend star Ranbir Kapoor carries a quiver of infinitely replenishing arrows and emerges from battles unscathed.

The animated ensemble feels more human than its flesh-and-blood counterparts. This is especially true of Rama, whose regal, hand-drawn conception allows for pulsing emotions, where the stilted Kapoor remains unmoved and unmoving. The 2-D anime places a meaningful emphasis on mortality, including a poignant debate about whether the villains deserve dignity in death by way of funeral rites. The film may be aimed at children, but there’s weight to the way it regards violent conflict — and it has a Ghibli-adjacent sense of environmentalism, too. 

Sako died in 2012, so he didn’t live to see Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama be fully embraced by Indian moviegoers. However, over a decade later, and over 30 years since its debut, it remains the closest thing to a definitive version of the epic — not to mention the best entry point for outsiders unfamiliar with the story.