‘Wade’ is an upcoming animated short film where climate change brings together a small group of people and an ambush of tigers in a future Calcutta, flooded beyond recognition in the aftermath of sea level rise.

In this 2D animated film, a band of environmental refugees is wading through the skeletal remains of the city when they are suddenly attacked by a blood-crazed man-eater tiger. As the tiger stalks his final victim of the day, a blind girl, a massive ambush of tigers led by a matriarch who can walk on water arrives on the scene. This film is one of the first classically animated projects in India to be born of a group of independent animators coming together as a collective without the backing of a studio setup. Every frame is drawn with meticulous care, and every background is painted with painstaking detail.

Animators Upamanyu Bhattacharya and Kalp Sanghvi talk about their ‘climate change horror story’, playing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival

Wade is about the Sundarbans, but the events in the film take place in Park Street, in front of Flury’s, its iconic patisserie, where a battle breaks out between humans and tigers. We are in 2040, in a post-climate change world. The Sundarbans, which have protected inland Bengal with its mangroves as a buffer against storms and cyclones, are gone, and now it’s Kolkata’s turn, which remains half underwater.

Wade doesn’t show anything that studies haven’t predicted already. Indeed, if the continuous rise in sea-levels drowns the vulnerable Sundarbans in the near future, Kolkata, which is just an hour and a half away, will be next in line. The city will drown and this is how it will look. People from the Sundarbans will migrate northward—more than a million already have, according to a National Geographic report from 2019—so will the crocodiles, mudskippers, and tigers. And it won’t make for a pretty sight

Upamanyu Bhattacharya and Kalp Sanghvi’s 11 minutes animated short isn’t interested in giving us sermons about saving the planet, because it never works. Instead, like dystopian fiction, it drops us bang in the middle of these apocalyptic scenes (there is not much background, except a present-day satellite view of the Sundarbans). The big problem staring at us after global warming is the mass migration that’s going to follow the loss of land; Wade, which is described as “a climate change horror story” and is playing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival, wants to explore this aspect of it. In the film, we don’t see anyone except a band of environmental refugees—including a blind child who is taken around on a raft made from plastic bottles—but the city walls are filled with anti-refugee graffiti.

Bhattacharya, 26, and Sanghvi, 28, along with four other twenty-something animators— Gaurav Wakankar, Isha Mangalmurti, Shaheen Sheriff, and Anwaar Alam—run a studio in Kolkata called Ghost Animation.