Film

Sita Sings the Blues

USA, 2008, 82 Minute Running Time
Genre/Subject: Animation
Language: English

MUST END Thursday, July 16
35mm presentation - A feminist spoof of the ancient Hindu epic The Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues uses a rich blend of visual styles to wed the story of a modern-day marital split to the saga of the goddess Sita, abandoned by her husband Rama. With funding from a Guggenheim fellowship, syndicated comic-strip artist Nina Paley (“The Hots,” “Nina’s Adventures”) single-handedly created this delightful, flash-animated adult cartoon on a laptop over the space of five years.
Paley began the project after her own husband moved to India to take a job and then ended their marriage via e-mail. Using her autobiography sparingly to frame the Hindu epic, she pulls humor from the experience via a 2-D pastiche. One animation style portrays Sita as a Betty Boop–like cariacature, another as a mythically sensual creature, and so on, while the modern-day parallels are tellingly bleak. The narrative is broken up by segments of stop-action cutouts as elaborate as pages in a children’s pop-up book, while shadow puppets engage in a gentle sibling rivalry to recount the details of the 3,000-year-old fairy tale. Meanwhile, blues ballads from the 1920s play in counterpoint to the narration. Such an ebullient combination ensures that Sita Sings the Blues remains surprisingly fresh and nuanced.
Yet even as it charms, it captures the sting of rejection and the confounding mystery of love lost; after all, as Paley explained during an interview with Wired earlier this year, even the gods at the center of the story “can’t make their marriage work.” It’s a handmade, heartfelt romp that the corporate heads at Disney could never have achieved.