Sita Sings the Blues
Found this on DVD at our local library and was very much delighted with the way the film mixes various styles of animation to tell three stories. Sita Sings the Blues is also available for free download/viewing online by the creator, Nina Paley. (Finally fixed the link, which *might* help the whole downloading the movie thing...geeze...)
The movie intertwines rotoscoped animated bits of Paley's story of her estrangement and divorce from her ex-husband with the story of Sita and Rama from the Indian epic the Ramayana. The main focus of the story are depictions of Sita and Rama's tale, told in two forms -- one being Mughal paintings for the depiction of events from the Ramayana, the second being a kind of Bollywood style version of 1920s/1930s cartoon animation used for musical numbers -- Paley uses songs by 1920s torch singer Anne Hanshaw for these to good effect -- and Indonesian shadow puppets mixed with background collages for commentary about the story.
The whole effect is just...wow. Very interesting and well worth checking out.
The movie intertwines rotoscoped animated bits of Paley's story of her estrangement and divorce from her ex-husband with the story of Sita and Rama from the Indian epic the Ramayana. The main focus of the story are depictions of Sita and Rama's tale, told in two forms -- one being Mughal paintings for the depiction of events from the Ramayana, the second being a kind of Bollywood style version of 1920s/1930s cartoon animation used for musical numbers -- Paley uses songs by 1920s torch singer Anne Hanshaw for these to good effect -- and Indonesian shadow puppets mixed with background collages for commentary about the story.
The whole effect is just...wow. Very interesting and well worth checking out.