The cartoonist Nina Paley turned filmmaker with Sita Sings the Blues, an eye-popping, brightly colored animated feature that throws together the three-thousand year-old Indian myth the Ramayana, the Boopish singing of the 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw, and the director's own sad story of the breakup of her marriage. In 2002, Paley's husband decamped from their San Francisco home to a job in India, where, after some time had passed, he deigned to let her join him. It was while she was living in India that Paley discovered the Ramayana and began to think that she could use it as a taking-off place for a comic strip. But when Paley was on a business trip to Manhattan, her husband, who sounds as if he just might possibly be someone who it would be fun to see get kicked to death, informed her by e-mail that he thought the marriage was over and that she shouldn't bother coming back. Paley subsequently fueled her bewilderment and depression into a short film, Trial by Fire, whose success on the festival circuit emboldened her to expand it until it had grown into the 82-minute Sita. "It sounds dumb", Paley recently told Margy Rochlin, "but the movie wanted to get made."

In its finished form, the movie veers back and forth between a sardonic telling of the story of Sita, who is a pawn of warring males and subject to the passive-aggressive whims of her adored husband Rama, in flash-animation segments that keep turning into musical numbers set to Hanshaw's records (which have a captivating tendency to end with a gurgled, "That's all!"), and scenes from Paley's personal life, which are done in funky, hand-drawn animation with lots of squiggly lines and characters that a couple of steps removed from stick figures. (The two worlds are held together by scenes in which a peanut gallery of contemporary Indians do their damndest to recount the story from memory, feeling free to weigh in, whenever they feel like it, on what jackasses the legendary characters are.) Paley, a self-taught animator, spent three years working on Sita, and then “At some point everything went through my computer.” All this work put her in a $20,000 hole, which is, she nots dryly, "why not everyone does it.” The movie's imaginative hand-made charms have made it a success on the festival circuit--I reviewed it in this space last year as part of our coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival--but the movie itself has been denied distribution because of financial demands made owners of the copyrights of the original songs. (Henshaw's actual recordings themselves aren't copyright-protected.)

Paley simply didn't have the money--none of the distribution deals she'd been offered would have been enough to cover what the song brokers were asking for--so for a couple of years now, showings of Sita have been restricted to such venues as the Museum of Modern Art’s annual "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" program, where it was the opening night attraction. However, as Rochlin reports, "public television stations can broadcast music without having to clear individual licenses, and Sita will be shown on the New York PBS station WNET on March 7, after which it will be available on the station’s Web site." After that, Paley, who has managed to get the licensing fee knocked down to "approximately $50,000," is hoping to finally release the movie, "in a manner as alternative as her film. Using the free software movement — dedicated to spreading information without copyright restrictions — as her model, she has decided to offer Sita at no charge online and let the public become her distributor." It's the strategy of an artist whose worries about getting paid have had time to get displaced by the thought that the best thing she's ever done might not have a chance to get seen by most people at all. Maybe when your material has been out there waiting for three thousand years and your singing star for eighty, it does wonderful things for your perspective.