From Belief to Screen: Durga Prasad’s Journey Behind Jay Jagannath
At Toonz Media Group, meaningful collaborations begin with respect for creative intent. As part of the Toonz Talks podcast series, Toonz recently hosted Durga Prasad, creator of the animated series Jay Jagannath, for a reflective conversation on belief, storytelling, and the long road to building a devotional animated series rooted in Indian culture.
Distributed by Toonz Media Group and brought to screens by Warner Bros. Discovery POGO, Jay Jagannath has grown into a widely loved series across India. But behind its success lies a journey shaped by personal faith, creative restraint, and persistence.
For Durga, the idea did not originate from a market gap or content trend. It came from lived experience. Growing up in Odisha, Jagannath was never a distant deity, he was part of everyday life. As Durga shared, Jagannath is “like a family member… a neighbour, a friend.” That closeness became the emotional foundation of the series.
The seed of Jay Jagannath was planted during a simple road journey, when Durga and his co-founder were discussing stories associated with Lord Jagannath. What followed was not a business plan, but an instinctive pull toward telling those stories in a form that children could engage with. The decision to create an original IP, however, came with real uncertainty. At the time, devotional animation was widely viewed as risky, with little precedent in the market.
Despite skepticism, Durga and his team chose to move forward independently, investing their own resources and building the project from the ground up. It was not an easy phase. He spoke of “many sleepless nights,” shared not just by him but by a team that slowly came together from across the country, artists, writers, and technicians who may not have grown up with Jagannath, but gradually connected with the spirit of the stories.
One of the most delicate aspects of the journey was character design. From the beginning, Durga was clear that Jagannath could not be reinvented. The challenge was not creation, but restraint. As he put it simply, “You cannot redesign Jagannath.” The team focused on simplifying the form just enough for animation, without stylisation that would distance audiences from a form they already held sacred.
Equally important was how Jagannath functioned within the narrative. Rather than portraying him as a problem-solving superhero, the series presents him as a guiding presence. Jagannath does not intervene to fix situations; instead, he shows the path, allowing characters to find their own strength. This choice shaped the emotional tone of the series and made its stories relatable rather than instructional.
Durga was also clear that the intent was never to preach. The stories of Jay Jagannath are rooted in everyday emotions, fear, doubt, kindness, courage, allowing children to absorb values naturally. If something stayed with the viewer after the episode ended, that, he felt, was enough.
As the series grew, finding the right partners became essential to scaling without compromise. Through its collaboration with Toonz Media Group, Jay Jagannath found the support needed to reach wider audiences while preserving its core belief system. With Warner Bros. Discovery POGO bringing the series to television, the show was able to travel far beyond its origins.
Today, with multiple seasons completed and a feature film ready for release, Jay Jagannath stands as a testament to what patient, belief-led storytelling can achieve. Durga describes the journey not as fast or easy, but as honest, one that required time, trust, and an unwavering connection to why the story was started in the first place.
His appearance on Toonz Talks reflects a shared belief between the creator and Toonz Media Group: that culturally rooted stories, when told with sincerity and care, continue to resonate across generations.