A guy spends 4 years in a Gujarat monastery.
He stares at a temple mural of 14 worlds.
The image refuses to leave his head.
A decade later… that mural becomes the next Baahubali. 🤯
Meet Ishan Shukla, director of Baahubali: The Eternal War.
At the 2026 Annecy Animation Festival, he dropped the origin story.
"I spent around four years in a monastery in India, from when I was around 30 to 35. There was a huge painting, a mural in the temple of the 14 worlds. That idea stuck with me for a long time."
That single mural is now the spine of an animated epic.
Forget the live-action world you know.
This one picks up after Baahubali dies.
He walks into the afterlife.
And straight into a war that never ends.
The French team behind the character design admitted they walked in thinking "easy, it's Lord of the Rings, Devas and Asuras are elves and trolls."
"That was a mistake. It's deeper than that."
Here's the part that almost broke them.
How do you animate a face the entire subcontinent has memorised?
Too realistic → looks like a PS5 cutscene.
Too stylised → fans riot.
Shukla didn't sugarcoat it:
"Prabhas fans are, you know, they'll kill you." 😅
So the team iterated. And iterated. And iterated again — chasing a single sweet spot where it feels like Prabhas without becoming a video game.
This isn't just an Indian production anymore.
Rajamouli has assembled an animation Avengers:
Let that land.
The people who gave the world Neon Genesis Evangelion are animating a slice of Baahubali's afterlife. 🔥
Target release: second half of 2027.
Rajamouli has been blunt about why this exists. Previous Baahubali animated spinoffs landed with moderate success. None matched the original thunder.
Then "one more crazy guy comes along" with a mural, a monastery, and 14 realms.
Indian mythology.
French design.
Japanese anime.
British CGI.
All stitched around a story a monk-in-training couldn't forget.
This might be the most ambitious thing Indian animation has ever attempted.
That's all for now!
