One of the most brilliant animated films of recent years wasn’t produced in a big studio, with dozens of animators and programmers. Nina Paley made it instead in her home studio with over the counter software, assembled by force of imagination from watercolor paintings, rotoscoping and flash animation. Her animated feature, Sita Sings the Blues, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. It’s out Dec. 15 on DVD.
The arresting image at the film’s onset sets the tone—or at least a tone in this multifaceted film. It depicts Sita, the faithful and much abused bride from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, with an antique Victrola in the form of a peacock, a motif in Eastern art. The bird’s beak is the stylus and its tail the horn. The peacock is playing a 1920s women’s blues recording, a ”my man done me wrong” tune, but its beak is stuck in a groove—like the mistakes we repeat over and over. Sita Sings the Blues uses ‘20s Bessie Smith-style blues to comment on the Ramayana from a women’s perspective. But the music isn’t the only exegesis offered. A trio of shadow puppets, standing for contemporary Indians, offers their own cheeky commentary. Sometimes they try to remember the names and places of the Ramayana, and their knowledge is half derived from Bollywood, as the epic unfolds in an animated rendition of traditional Hindu art.
And that’s not all. Paley interposes the story of her marital breakup, done in a totally different style of animation, with the Ramayana. Sita Sings the Blues suggests the eternal disappointment of women in a man’s world—a world whose culture has become a dense layering of historical places and periods.
