B&B: BUJJI & BHAIRAVA - Personality Rights of Prabhas and Brahmanandam.

Kalki 2989 AD, a movie that is one of the biggest and most talked about in the past year in the Telugu film industry. The movie is star studded project by Nag Ashwin with actor like Prabhas, Deepika Padukone, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan and Emran Hashmi. With less than a month to go for this Pan-Indian sci-fi movie, Director Nag Ashwin took a new route to promote the movie. While we saw earlier Rajamouli making animation series of the already hit movie “Baahubali”, team “Kalki” released an animation series before the release of the movie.

The series is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and consist of two episodes, each a little over 14 minutes introducing us to the world of Kalki. Characters of Prabhas as “Bhairava” and Brahmanandam’s character as his roommate, stood out the most to the Telugu audience in this series. This series introduces the role of “BU-JZI” or Bujji” and how she works at “The complex”, it also shows the building of the vehicle that was used heavily for promotions by the team in an animated way. The series is titled as “B&B;Bujji & Bhairava”, which is exactly what the series is about, how a local hero “Bhairava” comes across “Bujji” and how they team up to prepare us for the movie releasing on June 27^th of this month.

In the Telugu Film Industry, Rajamouli’s animated series for “Baahubali” was the first ever animated series, following its foot steps we now have this series.

The Intellectual Property Rights involved in such instance is that the celebrities are getting animated and their rights are protected under “Personality rights” and its their personality that is being animated.

This concept is prevalent in foreign courts but, in recent times the Indian courts have been acknowledging them as well. In this series, every celebrity whose animated version was seen on the screen would license their personality rights to the production houses.

One of the recent cases that happened under a similar topic is Jackie shroff approaching Delhi High Court to protect his nickname “Bhidu” under personality rights.