After creating ripples with their first release, The Legend of Shankhadar—Nepal’s first animated feature film—Yantrakala Studios have announced their next project, an animated movie on the Majipa Lakhay. The announcement was made with the release of a two-and-half-minute trailer at the Microsoft Innovation Centre in the Capital on Saturday. 

Based on the play of the same name written by cultural expert Satya Mohan Joshi, the movie will be based on the Lakhay tradition of Kathmandu, with Jung Bahadur Rana’s trip to England—the first official visit by a Nepali official—as its backdrop. 

Speaking to the Post about the new trailer, creator Sanyukta Shrestha said, “We were really heartened by the reception we got for The Legend of Shankhadar and now we are trying to come bigger and better than the last time. We have to; the audience will expect it from us!”

While the trailer was simultaneously released in Nepal and London—where Yantrakala Studios is based—Shrestha, reiterated that Majipa Lakhay remains a work in progress, even if its storyboard has been completed. 

“Majipa is still in its first year, and will take a couple more to bring into fruition. But a lot of research has been carried out in England [in places where Jung Bahadur visited] and the major sites in Nepal related to the Majipa Lakhay,” he said. 

According to Shrestha, Yantrakala is aiming to release the full movie in May 2020 on Satya Mohan Joshi’s 101st birthday. Lending voices to the animated movie will be actors Manish Kumar Shrestha, among others.  

The Majipa Lakhay is one of Kathmandu’s most important masked dances and occupies a prominent space in the city’s imagination. Not only is his dance—enacted through the old city’s maze-like streets every Yenya (Indra Jatra)—a much-awaited cultural event in the Capital, but the stark red mask and positively terrifying demeanour has made the Lakhay one of the most photographed and published cultural images of the Valley.