Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (2015)

A prince is about to be crowned, but his enemies conspire against him and take him out of the picture. The prince's chief adviser desperately needs to stall for time, and keep the general public confident that their prince is alive and well and preparing for his coronation. To achieve this he takes an unwitting visitor who is a dead ringer for the prince, and has him perform the role until the prince can be returned to power.

That's the plot of Anthony Hope's 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, a popular adventure novel that has been adapted many times for film and television over the years. It is a fairly versatile story, and that versatility has seen it transformed into contemporary political comedy in Dave (1993), South American intrigue in Moon Over Parador (1988), and even a four-part serial in Doctor Who ("The Androids of Tara" in 1978).

Now Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (literally, Found a Treasure Called Love), a 2015 Indian romantic comedy directed by Sooraj R. Barjatya, appears to follow the exact same storyline.

Arjun: The Warrior Prince (2012)

There are a lot of people who, for one reason or another, dislike Walt Disney. They dislike the man, they dislike the studio he founded, they dislike the animated product, the aesthetic, the merchandising, and so on. Slap a Disney logo on an otherwise amiable cartoon and it's likely to be ignored or, even worse, to be slated blindly through association. If it's got a Disney logo on it, some people simply won't give it a second look.

I wonder, then, what such naysayers would make of Arjun: The Warrior Prince. It's a Walt Disney Pictures animated film, but unless you're particularly geeky about the House of Mouse you probably haven't heard of it. It was paid for and distributed by Disney, but it was made in India. It is a Hindi language animated adventure film based in part of the Mahabharata, aimed at a family audience in India with no consideration given to whether or not audiences outside of the subcontinent will ever see it.

Blue (2009)

I'm not averse to the occasional Bollywood film, when the mood takes me. Culturally speaking, Bollywood is a highly distinctive form of cinema. Genre in American-dominated English-language cinema is generally a set of hard-and-fast rules, where elements are fenced off from one another so that a film can only be one or at best two things: a science fiction film, a horror flick, a romantic drama, a musical, and so on. These definitions are much more fluid in Bollywood cinema. Pretty much everyone knows that it's a form of motion picture where song and dance numbers can be inserted into any story. A film can shift from slapstick comedy to drama to confronting violence without a pause or second thought.

Sadly this old-school Bollywood method of film-making - a sort of "stick everything to the wall and see what happens" approach - is in decline, replaced by new films that increasingly attempt to ape the conventions and appearance of American cinema. This is a shame; I think India is losing something very distinctive and rather wonderful in the process. Blue is a case in point.