An engaging digital art and story-telling piece for children is currently available for viewing. The piece is called Once Upon a Tide and is suitable for six-year-olds and above, and is based on the true life story of the giant tortoise Diageo, from Galapagos Islands. It’s over a century old, and has bred almost 800 offspring in a breeding programme, thus re-birthing a whole species, otherwise threatened.

Using stop motion and other puppetry film techniques, the film uses stick puppets, hand waves and hand puppets among other kinds of tools to tell the story. The creators of Once Upon A Tide are a young Navi Mumbai-based company called Art Apart, illustrators and commercial artists by profession who have made their first foray into filmmaking with the piece. Raju Deshpande, founder, Art Apart, shares, “Puppet shows are beautiful. We were keen to adapt the news about Diageo in the pandemic’s first wave into an online movie. It was a depressing time, and we thought what better way to brighten up spirits than this venture. In our film, the tortoise is a turtle and he is called Bahadur. It is a take on Bahadur’s offspring, who in turn travel to Velas along the Konkan coast, to celebrate their father’s 100th birthday. The offspring are scattered all over the world in our case — France, West Bengal, the US, and they each carry their country’s national food for the celebration.”