Sita Sings the Blues

Plot synopsis:
=== The Ramayana ===
The film uses a pared-down adaptation of the legend that retains many of its finer details while adopting a perspective sympathetic towards Sita; in the director's words, the film is "a tale of truth, justice and a woman’s cry for equal treatment."
The plot joins the legend at the exile of prince Rama from his father's court, at the behest of his father's favorite queen, Kaikeyi. Having earned the right to any single favor by saving the king's life, Kaikeyi attempts to secure her own son's inheritance over the eldest and favorite, Rama, by ordering him banished from the court. Sita, Rama's wife, determines to accompany her beloved husband, although the woods are dangerous and overrun with demons and evil spirits. The demon king Ravana, encouraged by his spiteful ogress sister, hears of Sita's beauty and determines to kidnap her. He sends a golden hind past their dwelling to distract Rama, who tries to impress Sita by hunting the hind into the woods. In his absence, Ravana abducts Sita and demands that she submit to him on pain of death. Sita remains staunchly devoted to Rama and refuses to entertain the idea; Ravana sets a deadline for the ultimatum and Sita waits faithfully for Rama to rescue her.
Aided by the monkey prince Hanuman, Rama eventually discovers Sita's location and brings the monkey army to assist in her rescue. Ravana is slain and Sita restored to her husband, although he expresses serious doubts concerning her fidelity during her confinement. She submits to a trial by fire, a test of her purity; upon throwing herself into the flames, she is immediately rescued by the gods, who all proclaim her devotion and fidelity.
She accompanies Rama back to the palace, and soon falls pregnant. Lingering doubts still play on Rama's mind, however, and after overhearing one of his subjects beating and ejecting an unfaithful consort (claiming he is no Rama to accept and forgive her unfaithfulness), he orders his reluctant brother Lakshman to abandon Sita in the forest. In the company of ascetics she gives birth to her sons and raises them to love and praise their absent father. Years later, Rama overhears their hymns of adoration to their father and locates their dwelling. Distressed and disappointed by Rama's continuing doubt on her purity during her reunion with Rama, Sita prays to the earth to swallow her as final proof of her purity and devotion and the prayer is duly answered, despite the pleas of Rama and Lakshman.
=== Contemporary parallel ===
In an episode taken from the director's own life, animator Nina Paley starts the film living happily in a San Francisco apartment with her husband and cat. Her husband then accepts the offer of a six-month contract working in Trivandrum, India, and moves there alone to take up the position. After a month of no contact, he calls to inform his wife that the contract has been extended another year.
Bewildered by his callous indifference to their separation, Nina sublets their apartment, leaves their beloved cat behind and joins her husband in India. Upon her arrival he appears deeply unenthusiastic to be reunited and demonstrates neither affection nor sexual interest. A while later, Nina flies to a meeting in New York, where she receives a brief e-mail from her husband telling her that their relationship is over. Sad and alone, she stays in New York, finding comfort in a new cat and her study of the Ramayana.

Tags: tragedy, psychedelic, fantasy, murder

Review:
"Sita Sings the Blues" shows how one person with a laptop computer and something to say can make a far more satisfying work than 90% of the garbage that gets cranked out by people with a thousand times the money but one-thousandth the inspiration.
It isn't simply "background" to the telling of a story from the Ramayana; the piece is a meshing of Sita/Nina.
If the "point" of the work were simply to present the Ramayana on film the way "The Ten Commandments" is a filmed presentation of the Book of Exodus, it would be kind of silly to have Sita break into Blues songs in the first place, wouldn't it?
There are some movies that cannot be viewed separately from the story of their making - 'Citizen Kane', 'Apocalypse Now', virtually anything directed by Werner Herzog - and I feel that 'Sita Sings the Blues' is one of them.
To put it mildly, Nina Paley has completed a Herculean task by making this film: 82 minutes of animation, fluid and beautiful, in four different styles, all on her own, on her own personal computer.
This is readily apparent even in the basic idea of it - the Ramayana of Valmiki, with songs by '20s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw as the singing voice of Sita, intercut with the India-related breakdown of the creator's own marriage, which paralleled Sita's, narrated by three 'Desi' English-speaking Indians that can't agree on the details or the motivations of the characters and analyze the story constantly and hilariously as they tell it.
Also, laying down these ground rules pays off toward the end of the movie, when Paley starts to break them: this grabs the viewers' attention and sets the audience on alert when voices that we've been conditioned to expect while looking at cutouts intrude upon Flash animation.
In short, Paley makes sure transitions aren't jarring so she can jar us with them later, to good effect.For example: at one point in the movie, the three Indian narrators tell us of a trick by an evil king to lure Rama away from his wife Sita so that the king can kidnap her while he is gone.
The glamour of India, the glamour of the 1920s, the depth-sounding drumbeat of the ancient mythic world, and the woman who loves the wrong kind of man – Nina Paley gets them all together, along with a relevant chunk of autobiography about a disappointing husband of her own, in her dazzling first full-length animated feature.In the ancient Indian story, the Ramayana, Sita is the wife of the man-god Rama, and the embodiment of the Virtuous Wife.
In Paley's movie, Sita steps forward from time to time to sing a torch-y Jazz Era song ("Mean to Me," and the like) in the voice of Annette Hanshaw, a stylistically elegant and not-well-enough-known voice of the '20s.Sita's story (kidnapping by 9-headed king, rescue by Rama, rejection by Rama, monkey-god help) alternates with modern-day episodes about Nina's own real-life inexplicably disintegrating marriage, and also with the occasional very funny and illuminating conversation about the Ramayana and its meanings among several of the filmmaker's witty and well-educated Indian friends ("The king had four wives .
For myself, I also came away with the best grasp I've had yet on the Rama-Sita story, more than worth knowing both on the archetypal front (Some Things Never Change) and as background to the hundreds of Indian movie stories that take it up from one angle or another.July 28, 2009 NOTE - now on DVD!!.
And yet, if you have a chance (as I had) to see it on the big screen, it's one of the events of the year if you love animation and daring in film-making.It's a personal story of Paley's break-up with her boyfriend (who did it, savagely, over email), and put into a context of the story of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian story about a woman, Sita, and her bond with the blue-skinned Rama over a lifetime.
And the musical numbers are just about the best one has seen all decade (which goes without saying the lack of competition, but still), as we see Sita sing her feelings and thoughts, sometimes in happiness and sometimes totally down in the dumps (re: her pregnancy and abandonment after being rescued).There's a complex web of emotions that Paley navigates through, and she does it so confidently that it's hard not to marvel at her achievements here.
For me, this is a landmark film in dissolving my resistance to animation.The other elements so well integrated are the personal history of Nina Paley's broken marriage, the analogous situation of Sita's rejection by Rama in the Indian epic, Ramayana, and animated (in both senses) conversation about that epic.I first enjoyed this in a press screening for the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival.
'Sita sings the Blues' is an independent animated movie that re-tells the Ramayana using mainly 2D animation and some immensely refreshing screenplay.
The premise unfolds in three parallel tracks – one, with an American couple living in New York with the husband getting a project in Trivandrum in India; two, three Indians (yes yes, actual Indians!) voicing three shadow like caricatures bickering and debating about the events that Ramayana is popular for and a third, sort of, platonic/musical track is the animation piece where Sita breaks into one of Hanshaw's classics every time a relevant situation presents itself.
Be it the drawings that are set to a very 'Rajasthan painting' like motif or the 2D animated waist wiggle that Sita gets into whenever she thinks of her beloved Rama and voices out classics from Hanshaw's collection.
The way these various types of art pieces blend into one another with such finesse without taking away from the main plot is an effort that can only be described as – genius.But then 'Sita sings the Blues' is more than just eye catchy drawings, a narrative that holds you in place and a much contemporary way to retell the epic with the most unlikely Jazz legend for the songs!
A thought that throws more light on Ravana's much ignored and definitely much clichéd personality in our modern history.I strongly urge everyone to see this beautiful masterpiece of a movie not just to appreciate the artistic value it so boldly embodies but to also understand the subtleties with which it tells us how to get our priorities straight without being preachy.The only 'drawback', if I really had to pick, would be the slightly feminist seeming climax.
Featured in last year's edition of Animation Nation, I finally got a chance to watch this masterpiece by filmmaker Nina Paley when she released it on the Internet under the Creative Commons License.
And it is without a doubt that this piece of animation is well worth every minute of your time, especially when the visuals just arrests your attention from the get go, and has some wonderful music and songs by 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, who provides the titular Sita with her singing voice.Based on the epic Indian tale of Ramayana, focusing on the love triangle between Rama (voiced by Debargo Sanyal), his virtuous wife Sita (Nina Paley herself), and the adversary in the form of Ravana (Sanjiv Jhaveri) who lusts after Sita and kidnaps her, I have gotten a glimpse of this storyline when it got featured in films such as Swades and the more recent Delhi-6.
Essentially the extracts in those film featured how Ravana kidnaps Sita for her beauty, and wanted to make her his wife, only for her to hold out enough for Rama to find them, and to kill Ravana in an ensuing war.The story here expands that tale a lot more, starting with how Rama got banished from his kingdom by his father the King, and together with Sita, roams a forest until her kidnap, their reunion, and how Rama decided to banish her given his incessant suspicion that she may not have been pure, and got violated.
It's a sad love story in a way, and this film provided just enough to pique your interest in wanting to read up more.It's quite amazing how Paley herself directed this piece of magic, and adopted various animation styles to tell a story, and a musical, and has a separate tale set in the modern day to parallel that of the epic tale.
Her choice of the Annette Hanshaw tunes were a wonderful touch that fit the story to a T, and this can only be attributed to some astonishing creativity and innovation that Paley had demonstrated, and I can't help but to want more.The shadow puppet narrators (Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally and Manish Acharya) stole the show each time they're on, as they sound just like your good pals who can't wait to give you the lowdown on what they know about this tragic love triangle.
They're hilarious and never at any point felt deliberately so, with that very natural feel about the way they want to tell a story.I would have loved to experience this in a big screen theatre setting, but I guess that would not come anytime soon.
Paley uses great technique (including four diverse styles of animation) to tell a poignant story that every woman who has ever been in love will certainly understand.This is a great artistic accomplishment: creatively distilling intense personal pain into great art!
This movie combines all the wonderful elements of mythology with the winsome voice of Annette Henshaw and her own life experience as her marriage dissolves.This movie combines the absolute best of animation, music and myth.
For Nina Paley has made a masterpiece of animation that has it all: clear, beautiful, vibrant, witty,ironic tragic that equates Dave with Rama and herself with Sita.
Unlike much American animation which has lots of money behind it but little inspiration, this one is refreshingly mature,worthy of its subject, and yet can appeal to children: nothing false, cloying, ..just real feeling...Interestingly, Paley uses simple line drawings making her own story the more cartoonish, as if it was too painful to treat dramatically, and seems to sublimate it into Sitas story.When she learns dave has dumped her, her cry is cartoonish,...cockroaches replace the cat as her companions, as her life crumbles,,,.her life has gone dark, and so its fitting that at Ninas lowest point a dark figure dances amidst the flames.Throughout the beautiful voice of Annette Hanshaw, speaks for Sita, Nina and others dumped and unwanted: whose spouses have been mean to them..
While Sita Sings the Blues at least equals those in intelligence and wonder, it surpasses them in imagination considering the parallel stories of wives unfairly abandoned by their husbands are set in modern and ancient times, based on the well-know Ramayana story in India.Although the animation seems a primitive 2-D next to Pixar's successfully realistic product, director and almost everything-else-in-the-picture Nina Paley suffuses the frames with brilliant colors and variable landscapes.
Paley's success at entertaining with a wildly imaginative palette and lovable characters and cats contradicts, however, the generalization that all women suffer degradations centuries old—she is an artist and entrepreneur, who, faced with a restrictive copyright law that doesn't let her market the film because of Jazz singer Annette Hanshaw' 1920's performance (the music is in the public domain, but not the publishing) distributes her film free (find it in 10 installments on YouTube).Hanshaw's Betty-Boop like singing is the apex of pleasure in this multi layered story, whose intricacy is richly rewarding, sometimes difficult even for Indians to decipher, such as the three Indian voice-overs who wittily try to figure out the details of the Ramayana legend.
There is a musical version of it in which Sita -the main character- sings some classic blues that convey what is happening in the story, expressing Sita's feelings and mood.
Something completely different of what you are used to see.The music is great, not just because of the blues.The film has been controversial because the director did not know that the songs were still under copyright, despite the singer being dead for many years.
The family sued the director for an astronomical sum, but they ended reaching an agreement in which she still has to pay $50,000, which is a tremendous amount of money for a starving artist who made a film almost entirely on her own, with Indian musicians and actors contributing to the music and voices for free, and her own money and donations.There are not many independent animation movies being made by women.
"Sita sings the Blues" it's a clever, funny and original revision of the epic poem "Ramayana", from a satirical point of view; however, it still manages to be very faithful to the original story, combining many different animation styles (All of them very good) in order to create parallels of the poem with a break-up story that takes place in the modern times.The musical sequences, with the songs of Annette Hanshaw, strangely enough fit very well with the tone and style of the movie.
But the moment the movie Sita sings the blues got its way through mocking it lost something that is so important yet very difficult to gain.
The best animation style was probably the one where Sita was actually singing.This may be the shortest movie I've ever seen that had an intermission.
Being Indian I of course know the story of ramayana..it was glorified for all of us in our childhood as Rama is considered an incarnation of God. Being a woman, I have come to realize over the years what a terrible husband and man figure he was..something this movie highlights beautifully.
Sita Sings the Blues is probably one of the strangest movies I have ever seen.
During this viewing experience I learned about the Ramayana, learned about the story of Sita and Rama, and listened to some 1920's jazz music, and for the most part, it was very enjoyable.In the film, three narrators tell the story of Rama and his beautiful wife Sita as they are banished into the woods for 14 years.
A flash animation used to tell the story of Sita, a more generic 2D animation used for the three narrators, and a very crude animation used for the long distance lovers that greatly reminded me of It's Such a Beautiful Day. In my opinion the best part of the film was the conversations between the narrators.
Director Nina Paley is an American animator who was inspired by a reading of the Ramayana in 2002.
In this hilarious semi-modern adaptation of the classic Indian epic Sita looks like a Sanskritic Betty Boop, and does indeed sing the blues at various stages of this rip-roaring 82 minute piece of work.
The movie tells parallel stories, one an ancient Indian legend of Rama and his wife Sita, the other of the animator's relationship.
Animated (in various ways) story from an Indian book dealing with gods, demons, a beautiful wife, her husband and an evil king (or something).
She helped me to understand what was happening when it got confusing and I really think she should have done the DVD commentary.The story is the "Ramayana" as told from Sita's point of view.
However, since it is from her point of view, a lot of Rama's cool adventures are omitted from the story, so it's not really meant to be a complete retelling of this classic tale.Again, according to my super-cool daughter, practically none of the "Ramayana" is there, just the bits about Sita.
For example, the random, somewhat trippy music video in the middle of the movie was distracting and sometimes the modern day segments spliced in had little to do with the part of Sita's story being told.
However, like my wonderful daughter, I really liked the 1920s style musical interludes with Sita but think that perhaps one or two could have been omitted to tighten up the story.Overall, it's a weird but fascinating story told with really unusual artistry--especially because there must have been a half dozen or so completely different styles used throughout the film.
if you really wanna know this story about Ramayan then you should watch (1992) Movie "Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama".
A very aptly titled movie, Sita sings the blues tells the story of Rama and Sita as found in the Ramayana with some 1920s blues, sung by Annette Hanshaw thrown in.
The story of Rama and Sita is most clearly played out in a Mughal miniature style which is interspersed with the Hanshaw songs.
There are various parallels with the story of Rama and Sita, such as separation, and these are drawn out through the simultaneous development of the two stories.The songs are wonderful and the movie is a fair introduction to the Ramayana, although not entirely factually correct..
Nina Paley's animated musical that combines her collapsing marriage with the tale of Sita and Rama.The exception to the rule that flash animation really isn't the way to go for feature animation.
The problem is that the duel structure of the film, the tale of Sita and that of Nina Paley doesn't work.
Meanwhile, in another parallel story, Paley tells her own autobiographical journey of how her husband dumped her and left her with a broken heart that ultimately resulted in her creating Sita Sings the Blues.
Paley allows the film's visual palette to compliment what is happening to Sita during these musical interludes: When she sings "Am I Blue?" she literally turns blue.
Sita Sings the Blues represents all the reasons that I love the movies.
First the good parts of the movie were the music sung beautifully and the animation done in a pastiche of styles.The bad parts were the story itself which was a projection of the authors' sense of victimhood onto the story of Rama.
Rather than try to take the best or most important parts of the "Ramayana" and put it all together in a linear story, Nina Paley's inventively animated piece chooses to layer all viewpoints together, giving each world ample time to present their version of events.