Sita sings the blues
I'm always late to the party, but on the off chance that you haven't watched Sita Sings The Blues yet, you totally and utterly should. It rocks harder than a rainy day at Glastonbury, albeit in a totally different way.
I've just finished watching the thing and I'm still in that state of bouncy enthusiasm one gets from having watched something one really loved. In fact, I'm still so bouncy and enthusiastic that I'm not sure that I can actually write anything more coherent than I loved it, and if you haven't watched it, do so immediately so that I can rave about it with you.
That said, not being able to talk coherently about something has never actually stopped me talking, so here goes.
Sita Sings the Blues is a feature length musical animation. The film is a highly idiosyncratic retelling of the Ramayana, focusing on the story of Sita, Rama's devoted wife, who is abandoned by her husband for complicated and unfair reasons, that neither can fix, nor change. Sita's story is intercut with the story of Nina, a modern day American woman who is coming to terms with a marriage break up and finds comfort in the Ramayana. That's pretty much it. it doesn't sound that amazing a story line, but trust me it is. Like most good storytelling, things are kept relatively simple, and by keeping things relatively simple the film packs a powerful punch. I have a feeling you could probably watch the film several times over and see different things within it each time.
The narrative is held together by three argumentative shadow puppets, each of whom have a slightly different, and often highly entertaining take on the story. They were absolute quality, it was like listening to three old friends discuss a much loved story. They didn't always agree on certain points, and sometimes they found plot holes, and sometimes one of the narrators would actually get something wrong and get corrected by the others. I gather that there are multiple versions of the Ramayana as well as a strong oral tradition, and I liked the way the shadow puppet implicitly addressed both this and the nature of oral storytelling without making a massive point of it. Each of the puppets had very distinctive personalities and different takes on Sita's story. There were some fairly deep debates within the generally fairly light hearted commentary, though my favourite shadow puppet moment was a somewhat tangental discussion about the amount of jewellery one would have to wear to be able to drop enough to create a followable path from a forest somewhere in the middle in India to a fortress in Sri Lankra, followed by a discussion about whether Sita was actually wearing any jewellery anyway. I loved those shadow puppets to pieces, I could have listened to them chatting and arguing all day.
While there were quite a few things in the film that got me thinking, the things that are mostly going to remain with me are the animation and the music.
The animation is lush. Absolutely fragging gorgeous. Not just pretty, but visually interesting. There's a lot of different things going on, a massive hodge podge of different techniques and styles. There are so many different techniques thrown into the mix, that it could potentially have become quite trying. It wasn't. I'm not quite sure how it worked, but it did.
The music and animation are so entwined in places, that it's fairly hard to discuss one without the other. The bits that really stood out for me, and probably will for most people are the "Sita sings the blues" segments, where the voice of Annette Hanshaw, a jazz singer from the 1920s is given to Sita, who sings her heart out, usually while her world is collapsing around her. The animation in these segments is absolutely gorgeous, very very slick and polished, but with the innocence and hopefulness of a kids cartoon. Although I think these sections also owe quite a bit to the Fleischer brothers -- Sita actually looks a little like Betty Boop in these segments, and anything that combines 1920s jazz with animation makes me think immediately of that Cab Calloway/Betty Boop/St. James Infirmary clip (this one).
There's something very upbeat about Annette Hanshaw's voice, even when she's singing about heartbreak, and the choice of Annette Hanshaw as Sita's "voice" gives Sita that same upbeat hopefulness and occasionally rather knowing strength. Sita's character is defined by those songs and they become a very integral part of the film. In some places the animation and songs tie in so completely that the song is actually carrying the story, in other places the action radically re-interprets the song. In one particular segment (you'll know which one I mean if you've watched it) I actually had to remind myself that the animation had been done around the songs and not the other way round, the track in question seemed so apposite to the story that it felt as if it had been written for it.
Sita Sings the Blues has had some serious problems with copyright issues, these centre around Nina Paley's use of the Annette Hanshaw recordings. The issue seems fairly complicated, but appears to have been mostly (but not completely) resolved. Not using the recordings would presumably have fixed the problem, but they're such an integral and important part of the film that I can see why she's fought to use them.
The tagline to the film is "the greatest break up story ever told" and it really really is. Neither of the women gets her man. Neither woman gets a conventional happy ending. That said this is not a film that ever feels particularly sorry for itself. There's a strength and hopefulness lying just under the surface -- things don't always go well, but life goes on. In the midst of exile, banishment, abduction, captivity and war, Sita finds something to sing about; while Nina gets unexpectedly dumped in a really nasty way, channels a goddess, dances with rage and then just gets on with things, eventually taking her misery and channeling it into something creative and positive. There's a definite feel good factor to this film and I came away from it with a great big fat smile on my face and so did the person I watched it with.
Sita Sings the Blues is a feature length animation, written and produced by Nina Paley and distributed under creative commons license. You can download it here, watch it here and chuck them some cash here.
You should definitely watch this film if you've ever had your heart broken. Actually you should definitely watch this film fullstop.
I've just finished watching the thing and I'm still in that state of bouncy enthusiasm one gets from having watched something one really loved. In fact, I'm still so bouncy and enthusiastic that I'm not sure that I can actually write anything more coherent than I loved it, and if you haven't watched it, do so immediately so that I can rave about it with you.
That said, not being able to talk coherently about something has never actually stopped me talking, so here goes.
Sita Sings the Blues is a feature length musical animation. The film is a highly idiosyncratic retelling of the Ramayana, focusing on the story of Sita, Rama's devoted wife, who is abandoned by her husband for complicated and unfair reasons, that neither can fix, nor change. Sita's story is intercut with the story of Nina, a modern day American woman who is coming to terms with a marriage break up and finds comfort in the Ramayana. That's pretty much it. it doesn't sound that amazing a story line, but trust me it is. Like most good storytelling, things are kept relatively simple, and by keeping things relatively simple the film packs a powerful punch. I have a feeling you could probably watch the film several times over and see different things within it each time.
The narrative is held together by three argumentative shadow puppets, each of whom have a slightly different, and often highly entertaining take on the story. They were absolute quality, it was like listening to three old friends discuss a much loved story. They didn't always agree on certain points, and sometimes they found plot holes, and sometimes one of the narrators would actually get something wrong and get corrected by the others. I gather that there are multiple versions of the Ramayana as well as a strong oral tradition, and I liked the way the shadow puppet implicitly addressed both this and the nature of oral storytelling without making a massive point of it. Each of the puppets had very distinctive personalities and different takes on Sita's story. There were some fairly deep debates within the generally fairly light hearted commentary, though my favourite shadow puppet moment was a somewhat tangental discussion about the amount of jewellery one would have to wear to be able to drop enough to create a followable path from a forest somewhere in the middle in India to a fortress in Sri Lankra, followed by a discussion about whether Sita was actually wearing any jewellery anyway. I loved those shadow puppets to pieces, I could have listened to them chatting and arguing all day.
While there were quite a few things in the film that got me thinking, the things that are mostly going to remain with me are the animation and the music.
The animation is lush. Absolutely fragging gorgeous. Not just pretty, but visually interesting. There's a lot of different things going on, a massive hodge podge of different techniques and styles. There are so many different techniques thrown into the mix, that it could potentially have become quite trying. It wasn't. I'm not quite sure how it worked, but it did.
The music and animation are so entwined in places, that it's fairly hard to discuss one without the other. The bits that really stood out for me, and probably will for most people are the "Sita sings the blues" segments, where the voice of Annette Hanshaw, a jazz singer from the 1920s is given to Sita, who sings her heart out, usually while her world is collapsing around her. The animation in these segments is absolutely gorgeous, very very slick and polished, but with the innocence and hopefulness of a kids cartoon. Although I think these sections also owe quite a bit to the Fleischer brothers -- Sita actually looks a little like Betty Boop in these segments, and anything that combines 1920s jazz with animation makes me think immediately of that Cab Calloway/Betty Boop/St. James Infirmary clip (this one).
There's something very upbeat about Annette Hanshaw's voice, even when she's singing about heartbreak, and the choice of Annette Hanshaw as Sita's "voice" gives Sita that same upbeat hopefulness and occasionally rather knowing strength. Sita's character is defined by those songs and they become a very integral part of the film. In some places the animation and songs tie in so completely that the song is actually carrying the story, in other places the action radically re-interprets the song. In one particular segment (you'll know which one I mean if you've watched it) I actually had to remind myself that the animation had been done around the songs and not the other way round, the track in question seemed so apposite to the story that it felt as if it had been written for it.
Sita Sings the Blues has had some serious problems with copyright issues, these centre around Nina Paley's use of the Annette Hanshaw recordings. The issue seems fairly complicated, but appears to have been mostly (but not completely) resolved. Not using the recordings would presumably have fixed the problem, but they're such an integral and important part of the film that I can see why she's fought to use them.
The tagline to the film is "the greatest break up story ever told" and it really really is. Neither of the women gets her man. Neither woman gets a conventional happy ending. That said this is not a film that ever feels particularly sorry for itself. There's a strength and hopefulness lying just under the surface -- things don't always go well, but life goes on. In the midst of exile, banishment, abduction, captivity and war, Sita finds something to sing about; while Nina gets unexpectedly dumped in a really nasty way, channels a goddess, dances with rage and then just gets on with things, eventually taking her misery and channeling it into something creative and positive. There's a definite feel good factor to this film and I came away from it with a great big fat smile on my face and so did the person I watched it with.
Sita Sings the Blues is a feature length animation, written and produced by Nina Paley and distributed under creative commons license. You can download it here, watch it here and chuck them some cash here.
You should definitely watch this film if you've ever had your heart broken. Actually you should definitely watch this film fullstop.