S.S. Rajamouli is no stranger to pushing boundaries. His blockbuster films, such as “RRR” and the two-part “Baahubali,” have broken box-office records and put Telugu cinema on the world map. Now, Rajamouli is getting ready to do it all over again, this time in animation.

Though the filmmaker admits to having limited exposure to animation — because the medium is mostly treated as kid fare in India — he’s long known its power to create powerful, emotionally resonant stories. Now, he’s helping bring “Baahubali” to animation with “Baahubali: The Eternal War,” which held a work-in-progress presentation at the 2026 Annecy Animation Film Festival.

According to Rajamouli, writing the two-part “Baahubali” epic was his first time world-building for a movie. This meant that, in addition to the main story, he and his team also wrote an extensive backstory for the characters, about Mahishmati and Kunthala, their people, their traditions, their philosophy. 

“We started writing so much about it, and in the process of creating those worlds and creating those characters, we created many instances which were as dramatic or more dramatic than the scenes in the film itself,” Rajamouli told IndieWire after the Annecy presentation. Indeed, since the release of “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion” in 2017, there have been novels, comic books, two animated series, and even a video game, but it took until now for someone to come up with a good enough story for a “Baahubali” feature film. 

Enter writer/director Ishan Shukla (“The Bandits of Golak” episode of “Star Wars: Visions”), who pitched an idea for a movie set between the two live-action movies as the main character is killed. What if Baahubali dies and has to go through the 14 realms of the afterlife in Indian mythology? That’s the plot of “The Eternal War,” a movie Rajamouli teases is so big it simply could not exist in any other medium.

“Indian mythology is so rich in its vivid descriptions about characters of other worlds,” Rajamouli said. “Animation is the only place where you can do justice to that description. Ishan was the person we were rating for to take ‘Baahubali’ to the next step.”

The footage presented at Annecy captures the epic scope of the live-action “Baahubali” movies, with the stylized look of recent CGI animated projects like “Arcane.” There are dynamic fight scenes in zero gravity amid floating ruins, two-headed elephants and flying fortresses, mighty gods, dancing, and much more. It’s a movie that seeks to push the boundaries of what Indian cinema and animation can do. It’s a production that requires the collaboration of eight studios across the world, from India to France and even Japan (Studio Khara, the studio behind the “Rebuild of Evangelion” movies, is working on a special sequence for the film). Still, for Rajamouli, it was important to let the team do their thing and put their own spin on the franchise.

The filmmaker, who worked as a producer on “The Eternal War,” took the team of the animated feature through the making of “Baahubali,” its characters, how they behave and why they behave that way, so they have the fundamentals of it. “I gave them an overall view of the world and then trusted them to take it forward,” he said. This is partly to give Shukla the opportunity to make the story his own, and partly because Rajamouli admits he lacks sufficient familiarity with animation tools to be more heavily involved in the production.

Still, this is not to say Rajamouli doesn’t want to get into animation; quite the contrary. As the filmmaker put it, he had a brief introduction to the world of animation while making the titular fly character in his film “Eega,” which he credits with giving him the tools to start creating larger, more complex VFX sequences in his blockbuster movies. And after working on this film, the desire to go bigger has only increased. “I am dying to make a full-length animation feature myself one day, if the universe can conspire,” Rajamouli teased. 

Though he is still no animation expert, Rajamouli has been expanding his horizons. For example, the filmmaker said he recently got introduced to anime, and named “Demon Slayer” and “Attack on Titan” as shows that inspire him. “It is mind-bogglingly good the amount of emotion that’s been carried out by anime. I want to do something in anime; I think there’s a lot for me to learn in that world, and I’m looking forward to that.”

In the meantime, Rajamouli is finishing his latest live-action movie, “Varanasi,” a globetrotting epic spanning millennia, a story about gods and humans fighting in endless wars, and a movie starring Mahesh Babu riding a bull and wielding a trident in battle with the pyramids in the background. Rajamouli said they’re almost done filming, with the big spectacle action sequences already shot.

“I’m close to finishing shooting the movie,” he said, explaining that now the work shifts to the smaller scenes that connect the big sequences. When asked whether “The Eternal War” influenced how he’s approaching his new film, Rajamouli said they both share his approach to filmmaking and his goal in making movies. “If I can make at least a few people in the audience look towards India, that’s a great achievement.”