Actor-filmmaker Kamal Haasan, who rarely gets his observations about cinema wrong, once gave a mantra to a writer acquaintance of mine, who aspires to make a film. He said, "Bear in mind that movies have to be magic first." This goes right to the origins of the medium itself, or how crowds initially responded to the Lumiere Brothers' invention, almost running for cover, as they first experienced a train charging at them from a screen! Over the years, as Hollywood wholly organised itself into a capital-intensive industry, making movies the most Right Wing of all arts, aimed at heightening possibilities of magic—creating monsters, creatures, super-heroes, recreating the past, imagining the future of humans, exploring space, balletic action, and realistic violence—the only thing that changed was that merely the spectacle was no longer enough.

A story had to be told, too. And emotions expressed, and felt. Else, people would simply get bored. I could well be in the minority of one, but even as a kid, growing up, I felt animation to be too kiddish! No knock on Pixar films (which happened later), especially. But there is a cartoonish quality to the quick chatter in a cartoon talkie—recreated straight from the strip—that one could find hard to emotionally relate to if you're already used to fine human performances. Did Hollywood identify this as a problem-solving area worth scientifically investing in? In 2011, Stephen Spielberg as director, and Peter Jackson as producer, certainly did, as they rolled out The Adventures Of Tintin (2011), widely acknowledged then as a breakthrough of sorts in live-action, performance/motion-capture filmmaking.