Desi version of Lord Of The Rings?

Get ready for a desi Lord Of The Rings. After receiving an encouraging response to animated 3D feature, Toonpur Ka Superhero, director Kireet Khurana has now embarked on his next — an ambitious epic fantasy called Prithvi.

Get ready for a

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desi Lord Of The Rings

. After receiving an encouraging response to animated 3D feature,

Toonpur Ka Superhero

, director Kireet Khurana has now embarked on his next — an ambitious epic fantasy called

Prithvi

.

He promises that it will match Peter Jackson’s Academy Award winning Hollywood film in terms of its scale, story and visual effects. And to make sure that happens, Khurana is in talks with the technicians who worked on the

Lord Of The Rings triology

. “Some of them have agreed, in principal, to collaborate with me on

Prithvi

, but I am bound by a contract and cannot reveal any names or details at this stage,” he points out.

Set in a surreal, imaginary world, Prithvi is an allegorical story of a man’s journey to reclaim himself. Khurana recalls that on the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, the freedom fighter had expressed a desire to visit Pakistan. His well-wishers were shocked. They pointed out that too many lives had been lost during the Partition for him to get a rousing reception. To that reaction, Gandhi had said, “The only devils in the world are those rising in your own heart. That’s where the battle needs to be fought.”

Khurana picked on this Gandhian philosophy to weave the story of a man battling the devils, both inside him and outside. “I have been nurturing it for over a decade now,” he says.

It will have a blend of live and created characters in a computer-generated environment. “

Toonpur Ka Superhero

was simple as we only had to come up with a toon world. This one is a photo-realistic world with characters and monsters created in Photorealistic CG Imagery; a first-of-its-kind for Indian cinema, so the challenges are bigger,” Khurana reasons.

The ‘international’ feel and subject has already elicited a lot of interest. He’s currently in talks with various producers to raise the additional finance and resources required for the film: “The pre-production in terms of story, set and character design is underway. I’d like to get started by the end of the year.”