India has never lacked stories worth animating. What it has lacked is a way to produce them at anime's level of craft without the decade-long timelines and studio budgets that put the format out of reach. That gap is exactly what Swarajya exists to close.
Swarajya is a Retency original: an anime series based on the life of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, a story of strategy, courage and identity that maps almost perfectly onto the emotional grammar of anime. It's also the hardest thing we've ever made, because long-form AI storytelling exposes every weakness AI has. Here's what we learned building it.
The hardest problem: character consistency
Anyone can generate a single striking anime frame. The moment you need the same character to appear across dozens of shots, same face, same armour, same presence, from different angles and in different lighting, the difficulty multiplies. This is where most AI video falls apart, and it's the single biggest technical problem in AI animation.
Solving it isn't about a magic prompt. It's a disciplined pipeline: locked character references, controlled generation, and a lot of human direction deciding what's canon and what gets thrown away. The AI accelerates the work; it does not replace the judgement.
AI didn't make the storytelling easier. It made it possible at a scale and speed that would otherwise need a full studio and years of runway.
Direction still decides everything
The romantic fear about AI art is that it removes the artist. Building Swarajya proved the opposite. Every choice that makes a scene land, the composition, the pacing of a reveal, when to hold on a face, the weight of a silence before a battle, is a human directorial decision. The tools generate options; taste selects among them.
That's the same principle that runs through all our commercial work. Whether it's an anime frame or a performance ad, the AI handles production volume and the humans handle the decisions that actually create meaning. Get that division wrong and you get generic output. Get it right and you get work with a point of view.
An episodic-ready pipeline
A one-off short is a demo. A series is a system. To make Swarajya sustainable, we had to build a repeatable pipeline, one that can produce finished frames in days rather than the years a traditional production would demand, while keeping quality and character consistency stable across episodes.
That pipeline is the real asset. It's what turns "we made a cool AI clip" into "we can produce an ongoing series", and it's directly transferable to brand storytelling. A brand world, a recurring mascot, an episodic content series: the same machinery that builds Swarajya can build a brand's own universe.
Why this matters for brands, not just us
Swarajya isn't a vanity project sitting to one side of our commercial work. It's our R&D lab. The hardest problems in AI creative, consistency, direction at scale, long-form coherence, all show up in an anime series first, and the solutions flow straight back into the ads and films we make for clients.
When a brand asks us for a character-led ad campaign that has to stay coherent across twenty assets, we're not guessing. We've solved that problem at the hardest possible difficulty. That's what building original IP buys you: the studio gets sharper, and every client inherits the edge.
You can watch the trailer and read the full story of the series on the Swarajya page.