A string of animated films starring Hindu gods proves a hit with Indian children and their parents.

On December 2008, cinema theatres across India saw the release of 2D animation film, "Return of Hanuman".

Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, surveys the world via video-conferencing. Hanuman, the monkey deity of Ramayana fame, strums a guitar and deals with climate change. Ganesha, the elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles, helps a lonely boy through a series of adventures.

Welcome to the world of Bollywood animation, where ancient mythologies are being adapted and meshed with our modern world of social anxiety, Blackberrys and environmental pollution. The main market target has been children, who have given an enthusiastic reception to a new pantheon of cartoon television series and movies featuring India’s gods.

There’s My Friend Ganesha, a blend of live-action and cartoon which hit cinemas last year. It tells the story of how a boy becomes mates with the elephant god after rescuing a mouse that happens to be Ganesha’s pet mount. There’s The Return of Hanuman, a movie where the monkey-headed god speaks Hinglish - a trendy blend of Hindu and English - and delivers a message on the evils of plastic usage. There’s Krishna, a popular TV series featuring the blue-bodied deity.

Anshuman Misra, the managing director of Turner International India, told The Washington Post recently that Krishna was rated the most popular series shown on any children’s channel in India last year, beating a series based on the Harry Potter books. Turner International India owns the Cartoon Network and Pogo channels in the country.

On the critical front, the shows have received mixed reviews. Some lamented the quality of the animation, observing that Bollywood cartoons have a long way to go before matching their Hollywood counterparts.

The Hindu’s entertainment column observed that The Return of Hanuman is “a grown-up’s nightmare if you start checking for historical… er… mythological inaccuracies or decide to make unfair comparisons with animation flicks produced out of Pixar, with budgets a hundred times more.” Many felt that, from a dramatic point of view, the movie tries to deal with too many issues, including global warming.

There’s one group that’s happy - parents. Worried that their children may grow up on a purely Western pop-culture diet of Spiderman and MTV, they welcome a trend that showcases India’s traditional superheroes. And if these superheroes happen to have contemporary issues at heart, such as saving the planet by curbing carbon emissions, well all the better.