Swanand Kirkire was one of the first celebrities to voice his disappointment with Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s 2023 blockbuster family crime drama Animal. The actor-singer-lyricist called out the regressive politics of the film on X, much to Sandeep’s chagrin, whose team then issued an aggressive response on the platform.
Now, Swanand has clarified that like his senior Javed Akhtar, his issue with the film was its acceptance by the audience, not so much the film itself. “If you read my tweet closely, it humbly says the only problem I had with Animal was that someone is saying something with so much audacity, and our public, especially girls, are embracing it dearly,” said Swanand.
In the interview with The Lallantop, Swanand pointed out how Animal shows that we’ve regressed from classics like Mehboob Khan’s Aurat (1940) and Guru Dutt’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1963) to recent seminal films like Vikas Bahl’s Queen (2014) and Shoojit Sircar’s Piku (2015). “These films made men from Indore, like me, gradually realise what equality means. Hindi cinema was teaching you how to see women in a new light in different ways. Even with how independent the women of Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009) were! Then there comes a guy who makes a film like Animal, and we accept it. My problem is with the acceptance, not with the film being made,” said Swanand.
He recalled the day he watched Animal, he met a girl who said that she’s watched the film twice because “Bobby Deol is so hot.” That enraged Swanand as Animal was a film in which Vanga dismissed other forms of masculinity from its inception to uphold the most toxic version of masculinity.
As a poet and lyricist himself, Swanand also found it contentious that through his protagonist, Ranbir Kapoor’s character Rannvijay Singh, he also dismissed poets. In a much talked about scene, Rannvijay argues that males were historically only alpha. The insecure males, who couldn’t be alpha, became poets, thus giving rise to a new form of masculinity.
“I don’t have an issue with that. But he says that those can’t become alpha males, becomes poets instead. But he’s playing Arjan Vailly in the background for his alpha male. That’s a poem, right? So you do need a poem to make him an alpha male. You may have dismissed poetry in a dialogue, but you can’t dismiss songs. He (Vanga) will get upset with me again after this, but that’s okay,” added Swanand.
Also Read — Sandeep Reddy Vanga recalls an IAS officer’s reaction to Animal: ‘He sounded like I committed some crime’
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Inspired by Punjabi folklore, Arjan Vailly was originally composed by legendary Punjabi singer Kuldeep Manak in the 1950s. It’s been rehashed by Bhupinder Babbal and Manan Bhardwaj in Animal. It plays in the pre-interval action sequence in which Ranbir’s character is slashing dozens of masked men.
