The Screengrab : nina paley

Watch It For Free: Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley)

Paul Clark — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Through a strange twist of fate, one of the most acclaimed animated films of recent years has also been one of the most difficult to see. Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, which has gotten rave reviews at film festivals worldwide, is an infectious mix of Indian legend, autobiography, and songs by the semi-forgotten jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, set to vivid animation which combines traditional hand-drawn animation, CGI, cut-and-paste, and more. A film this singular could only be made as a labor of love, and Paley, who drew simultaneously from the Ramayana and her own experiences after her husband left her, spent five years of her life finishing the film, and her effort shows in every inventive and painstakingly detailed frame of the film.

Even under the best of circumstances, Sita Sings the Blues is the kind of unique film that brings out the goodwill and affection of audiences. But the legal troubles that have surrounded the films- specifically, the demands of the rights-holders to the songs, who are asking upwards of $200,000 for their use- have made those who love the film feel protective of it in an almost proprietary way that transcends the film’s cheeky opening credit, “Your Name Here presents.” These rights issues have thusfar kept the film out of commercial release, but recently Paley has been able to locate a loophole in copyright law that will allow the film to play on public television, New York’s WNET, where it premieres on March 7 at 10:45 PM. But unless you live in the New York market or are lucky enough to catch a screening of the film (such as this year’s Ebertfest), your best chance to see Sita is to catch it streaming online. It’s currently streaming at the Reel13 web site, and will appear elsewhere following its WNET premiere.

Click here to stream Sita Sings the Blues in full. It’s well worth the 82 minutes it’ll take to watch it, take it from me.

Or, if you still need more convincing, here’s the trailer for the film:

Nina Paley's "Sita Sings the Blues": (Finally) Coming Soon to a TV or Computer Screen Near You

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:07:00 GMT

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.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Sita Sings the Blues"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In her comic book work from some fifteen years ago, Nina Paley spoofed the trend towards "confessional" autobiographical comics such as those done by people like Julie Doucet and Joe Matt. Drawing in a goofy, bigfoot-cartoonist style, Paley complained that she hadn't enjoyed enough unhealthy, grotesquely unstable life experiences to compete with the real trailblazers in that field. Sita Sings the Blues, Paley's first animated feature, shows that time has helped her catch up a little in the miserable-experience department, and it also shows an artist who's blossomed a bit in the face of the possibilities offered by moviemaking. It also shows that Paley has found a way to be confessional without being exhibitionist or soppy.

The center of the movie is taken from part of the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana, dealing with Rama and his wife, the goddess Sita, who maintains her devotion to him even as he repeatedly seeks out reasons to doubt her chastity and cast her away. (In response to this treatment, Sita tends to express her regret over having not killed herself earlier before others had suffered on her behalf.) The film happily juggles a fun-house buffet of styles. Parts of it are narrated by a trio of shadow puppets with Indian voices--provided by Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya--who relate the story in a conversational, sometimes argumentative way that sounds as if they were drawing on their memories of having heard it as children and haven't been allowed to consult Wikipedia. It's also depicted on-screen through brightly colored animation that suggests an Eastern version of Terry Gilliams' cut-out world-classics work with Monty Python. There are even several lively musical numbers, with Sita's singing voice provided by Annette Hanshaw, a 1920s vocalist whose old records are used on the soundtrack. All this is intercut with the bare bones of the story from Paley's own life that got her thinking about this story: how her husband got a job in India; how he persuaded her to sublet their San Francisco apartment, complete with cat, and join him after his contract was extended; and how he waited until she had gone to New York on business to break up with her by e-mail. Sita is funny and eye-popping and never bogs down. It might also double as a great introduction for kids to the Eastern canon, assuming you don't mind your kids asking you to explain the joke about the mile-high club.