When you sat down to illustrate The Ramayana, were you influenced by what you learned when you were storyboarding movies like A Bug's Life or Monsters, Inc.?

Of course. In particular, I was influenced by something that happened when I was working with Brad Bird on The Incredibles. I was storyboarding a scene where the family is finally reunited in the jungle after being separated. It's a really neat moment because throughout the movie, they never all get to use their superpowers together as a family, and it's something you're just dying to see. Brad Bird told me, "Play around and see what kinds of visual ideas you can come up with."

And so I did—it turned into this long, sprawling thing. So Brad looked at all the material I presented him, and he sat me down and said, "Sanjay, these are great ideas. But the problem is that if we do all of them, we slow down the movie to give the audience a big meal. What I'm trying to do is to make each one of these scenes feel like an appetizer. We need to make this feel light and leave the audience wanting more."

That's the way I approached telling this immense epic, probably one of the longest stories put to page. I took it as my job to create a small appetizer in each moment: he meets the monkey king, he confronts the demon. If you research it, there's so much depth in each of these moments. But in each case, I had to choose one thing I could give to the audience. The hardest part was paring it down without losing the essence.

And since this book isn't an animation, each image has to convey so much. For instance, there's the moment when Rama's stepmother sends him into exile. There's so much going on in that picture: the queen's finger pointing and the bracelets on her arms and the soldiers holding their spears and Rama bowing at her feet.

Those are all things I was definitely trying to convey. I start out with a title—the title, in that case, was "Exile." From there, I think of a storytelling image. I don't think of multiple images—I just think about one iconic image. When you think about Titanic, for instance, you think of the two of them on the bow of the ship. There's one image so potent that it burns into your memory.

Once I think of that image, I try to think the way we think when we're creating an animated sequence—we ask ourselves, "If the sound was turned off in that scene, would the audience still get what we're trying to convey?" Pictures are the fastest way to convey information. They're way faster than words. So if someone was just flipping through my book in a cursory way, I wanted them to be able to say, "Things are good now, things are not so good now, the colors are bright, the colors are stripped down and he's just using blues." And if they found that engaging, they might want read my little paragraph. I thought that in that way, maybe I could get the audience interested in this ancient story.