In hollywood, animation is a three-dimensional rat with a pink snout and a passion for French cuisine, it is computer-generated craftsmanship that makes every whisk and whisker come alive; it is DreamWorks' green ogre meeting a princess and riding into the box-office sunset. Hollywood is not where a little known art form from Brajbhoomi makes waves and wins applause. At least not until 39-year-old Dhvani Desai made an 11-minute animation film called Manpasand: The Perfect Match, in which she packed the intricate, colourful, even formulaic, stencils of sanjhi art.

Desai, who was in Delhi, was visibly excited by the response her debut film has received. At a film festival in Hamburg where it was premiered, the audience couldn’t get enough of it. “It was screened three times on public demand, and there would have been a fourth show if I had had time to stay on,” says the Mumbai-based advertising professional who flew down for the Asian Women’s Film Festival in which Manpasand was shown. Earlier, it won the bronze for the best children’s film at the New York International Film Festival and was nominated for the best animation at a short film festival in Hollywood. That was not something Desai dreamt of when she “got bored with the routine of storyboard and special effects that I’d been doing for 15 years” and decided to make an animation film on a Panchatantra story about the mouse woman. Can’t blame her if she “felt like a small god”.

“Young girls used to draw their dream husbands in sanjhi images, believing they’d get what they asked for. I decided to make the film using sanjhi to draw attention to it,” says the filmmaker, who travelled to places where sanjhi was once prominent. However, not everybody has bought Desai’s argument that sanjhi is a dying art, at least not Kapila Vatsyayan. But the film, a blend of hand drawings and digital effects, is indeed riveting. “Sanjhi art has never been used in animation before,” says Desai. “The elephant, for instance, was made up of 170 pieces and I had to animate all the pieces in one fluid movement so that it looked as if the whole animal was moving. It took me more than two years and 42 artists to finish the film.”

The film bug has bitten her. Nowadays, when she isn’t hard at work at her agency, she reads scripts for her next film. “I have four folk tales and another dying art form I want to highlight,” she grins. That godly feeling again?