RAMAYANA: THE LEGEND OF PRINCE RAMA REVIEW
Voice Actors (Tamil): Sendhil Kumar, D. Mageshwari, Praveen Kumar, Thyagarajan, Lokesh, Ravuri Haritha
Director: Yugo Sako, Koichi Sasaki, Ram Mohan
Rating: 3.5/5
There’s something poetically fitting about watching a Tamil-dubbed version of an Indo-Japanese Ramayana adaptation in 2025, as if the very act of viewing reinforces the epic’s transcendent ability to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Yugo Sako’s 1992 masterwork, newly restored in 4K and redistributed across Indian theaters, arrives at a moment when contemporary attempts to visualize this foundational epic have ranged from the misguided to the catastrophic (pour one out for Adipurush).
What’s immediately striking about The Legend of Prince Rama isn’t just its technical achievement – though the marriage of Japanese anime precision with Indian artistic traditions remains breathtaking – but rather how it navigates the treacherous waters of adapting sacred text with both reverence and cinematic verve. The character designs split the difference between Raja Ravi Varma’s portraits and Hayao Miyazaki’s ethereal aesthetics, while Vanraj Bhatia’s score incorporates Sanskrit hymns through orchestral swells with the confidence of a tightrope walker.
Following Prince Rama’s exile, Sita’s abduction, and the subsequent war with Ravana, the film employs its animated form not as a limitation but as liberation. Where live-action adaptations often stumble into uncanny valley territory when depicting divine beings, Sako and co-directors Koichi Sasaki and Ram Mohan use animation’s inherent abstraction to make the mythological feel tangibly present yet appropriately otherworldly. The sequence where Hanuman leaps across the ocean, his shadow dancing across waves that shimmer with almost tactile detail, captures precisely why animation was the perfect medium for this story.
While the new Tamil dub occasionally feels more dramatically pitched than necessary, it rarely detracts from the visual splendor on display. The film’s pacing occasionally betrays its age – modern audiences might find the mid-section’s deliberate rhythms testing their patience – but there’s something refreshing about an epic that takes its time, especially when each frame is composed with such evident care.
What’s most remarkable is how the film’s anti-war sentiment, radical for its time, feels even more pointed today. When Rama speaks of humanity transcending the divisions of battle, or when Sita expresses remorse for a conflict that “could have been avoided,” the film reveals itself as not just a religious text adaptation but a quietly subversive peace treatise wrapped in mythological clothing.
This restoration serves as a reminder that sometimes the most forward-thinking works are those that look backward with clarity and purpose.