O' Faby


O' Faby is a 1993 Indian Malayalam-language film. It was India's first full-length live action/animation hybrid feature film. Directed by Sreekumar Krishnan Nair, it stars Nagesh, Thilakan, Roque Tharkan, Manoj K. Jayan and Srividya. The director of animation was Ram Mohan, known as the father of Indian animation. The film featured KJ Yesudas, KS Chithra and SP Balasubrahmanyam singing the lyrics of Bichu Thirumala. The cinematography team included Jayanan Vincent, Ramachandra Babu and Venugopal Madathil

Plot

O' Faby tells the story of the friendship between the hero and the animated character, Faby. The producer's son Roque played the hero role. The movie is about the various troubles the hero falls in and how Faby helps him out of these situations.

Cast

Development

K. Sreekuttan, son of veteran director M. Krishnan Nair decided to make a live-action animated film after watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit and wanted to attempt similar experiment in Malayalam. Simon Tharakan, an NRI who came to know about a news article of mechanical robot founded by Sreekuttan's friend Sabu travelled to India to meet the inventor and he decided to produce a film.
Sabu and Tharakan decided to have Sreekuttan to handle the direction after observing his work on the sets of Sargam. Sreekuttan expressed his interest to do a live-action animated film to which they agreed. Tharakan came up with a concept based on character Fagin from Oliver Twist. Tharakan's son Roquey was chosen to portray the film's main protagonist.

Filming

To make actors react and emote to the animated character, Sreekuttan chosen Raghu of Mela to play human version of Faby and a costume was created to resemble the sketches of Faby and given to Raghu. After this, the scenes were shot again leaving spaces to be “filled in later” with the animated figures.
For the post-production to include animation, makers met Ram Mohan, father of animation who scolded them for making a film without employing an animator for pre-production and for not story boarding the film however he then gave them drawings for the cartoon characters along with a template of expressions for each situation. Makers had problems in including the animated sequences to the footage so a basic Click 3 camera was bought and a halogen light was fixed onto it, "Each film from O’ Faby's reels was then fixed onto the Click 3 camera for the image to get magnified, making the tracing simpler". Around 50 artists too were hired full-time to sketch the cartoon characters into cel sheets which went on for more than a year. The film's budget was around 1.4. crores.

Soundtrack

Soundtrack was composed by Johnson.
Simon Tharakan who produced the film had distributed it all by himself. The film was released in August 1993 despite hype, the film bombed at the box-office.