Product Description

SITA SINGS THE BLUES - DVD Movie

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95984 in DVD
• Brand: Victor
• Released on: 2009-07-28
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, NTSC, Widescreen, Color
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 82 minutes

Review
I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to another. It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by a girl from Urbana. That's my home town. It is titled Sita Sings the Blues. I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week. I get an e-mail from Betsy, my old pal who worked with me on The News-Gazette. Did you see the film by the mayor's daughter? This intrigues me. The daughter is named Nina Paley. I do a Google run and discover that Hiram Paley was mayor from 1973-1977. I am relieved. This means the girl probably didn't make the film as a high school class project. In fact, by my rapid mathematical calculations, she may have been conceived in City Hall. I used to cover City Hall. Worse things have happened there. By this point, I'm hooked. I can't stop now. I put on the DVD and start watching. I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town. To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him. Of course there is a lot more to it than that, involving a monkey army, a lustful king who occasionally grows 10 heads, synchronized birds, a chorus line of gurus, and a tap-dancing moon. It coils around and around, as Indian epic tales are known to do. Even the Indians can't always figure them out. In addition to her characters talking, Paley adds another level of dialogue: Three voice-over modern Indians, ad-libbing as they try to get the story straight. Was Sita wearing jewelry or not? How long was she a prisoner in exile? How did the rescue monkey come into the picture? These voices are as funny as an SNL skit, and the Indian accent gives them charm: What a challenge, these stories! Sita, the heroine, reminds me a little of the immortal Betty Boop. But her singing voice is sexier. Paley synchs her life story and singing and dancing with recordings of the American jazz singer Annette Hanshaw (1901-1985), a big star in the 1920s and 1930s who was known as The Personality Girl. Sita lived around 1000 BCE, a date which inspires lively debate among the three Indians discussing her. But when her husband outrageously accuses her of adultery and kicks her on top of a flaming pyre, we know exactly how she feels when Annette Hanshaw sings her big hit, Mean to Me. Read more here at blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/having_wonderful_time_wish_you.html --Rogert Ebert

WHAT do a 3,000-year-old Sanskrit epic, a 20s-era jazz singer and Indonesian shadow puppets have in common? They re all part of the eclectic cultural tapestry that is Sita Sings the Blues, an 82-minute animated feature that combines autobiography with a retelling of the classic Indian myth the Ramayana, and that required its creator, the syndicated comic-strip artist Nina Paley, to spend three years transforming herself into a one-woman moving-picture studio. At some point everything went through my computer, said Ms. Paley, who is self-taught and whose longest animated film before this of a dog chasing a ball clocked in at just over four minutes. Her decision to do it herself may have satisfied her creative urges, but it also put her more than $20,000 in debt. That s why not everyone does it, she said. It s hard to imagine how Ms. Paley, 40, could have farmed out the writing, directing, editing, producing and animating of Sita Sings the Blues. As engaging as the film is, explaining it is tricky: along with traditional 2-D animation there are cutouts, collages, photographs and scenes with hand-painted watercolors as the backdrop. At certain points Ms. Paley mixes laughs with exposition by having three flat silhouette characters dispute the details of the Ramayana s tragic saga of the Hindu goddess Sita, who is exiled by her husband, Rama, who fears she has been unfaithful after she is abducted by a demon king. At other points Ms. Paley weaves in the story of her own collapsing marriage, and the time switches from ancient India to present-day San Francisco and Manhattan, the images hand-drawn and jittery. In between everything else are flash-animation musical numbers featuring Sita in voluptuous Betty Boop-like form almond-shaped head, saucer eyes and swaying hips accompanied by the warbling voice of a real-life flapper-era singer named Annette Hanshaw. For fans of Sita Sings the Blues Ms. Paley s imaginative leaps and blend of styles are part and parcel of the film s visual and aural originality. You can actually feel how much time went into it, said Alison Dickey, a film producer and one of the jurors who nominated Ms. Paley for Film Independent s Someone to Watch honor, to be announced at the Spirit Awards next Saturday. We see so many films, and when you come across one like this, you just feel like you ve stumbled upon a gem. In 2002 Ms. Paley followed her husband, an animator, from their home in San Francisco to a town in western India. It was there that she first learned of the tale of the Ramayana. When she reached the part when Sita kills herself to prove her fidelity, she said, she thought, That s just messed up and wrong. An idea for a postfeminist comic strip began brewing. In it her new ending would still have Rama rejecting Sita, but instead of committing suicide she would become empowered. She says, To hell with you. I m going to go join a farming collective. Before Ms. Paley could commit her I-will-survive strip to paper, though, life intervened. While she was on a business trip to New York, her husband sent her an e-mail message telling her not to return. In a state of grief, agony and shock, she remained in Manhattan, camping out on friends sofas. One of her hosts, a collector of vintage records, played Annette Hanshaw s shiny rendition of Fred E. Ahlert and Roy Turk s bluesy lament Mean to Me. A friend of mine joked, That s your theme song, Ms. Paley said. And while Mean to Me and Rama s rejection of Sita made sense together, she didn t have the money or the emotional energy to envision more than a short film. - - Margy Rochlin To read more visit nytimes.com --New York Times

Beautifully audacious...an enchanting, playfully funny cartoon for adults --Premiere Magazine

About the Director
In 1988, Paley moved to Santa Cruz, California and began to write and draw the strip Nina's Adventures. In 1991, she moved to San Francisco. In 1995, she began to draw the more mainstream Fluff, a comic strip about a cat, which enjoyed a modest success in syndication. In 1998, she also began to experiment with animation. In 1999, she made the world's first cameraless IMAX film, Pandorama, a short Modernist film which was shown widely at major film festivals in 35 mm form during 2000 and 2001. In 70 mm form, it also ran for about a year as a short feature at Berlin Cinestar and has been shown at IMAX theaters elsewhere. In 2001, she produced Fetch!, a humorous short cartoon feature based on a variety of optical illusions, which has enjoyed popularity ever since. She then embarked on a series based on a more controversial subject, population growth. The centerpiece of the series was The Stork, in which a serene landscape is bombed to destruction by bundles of joy infants (brought by storks). The film is a compact expression of the conflict between increasing human population and the ecosystem in which it must live. While the 3 1/2 minute film angered some viewers, it was a considerable success at festivals, and resulted in an invitation to Sundance in 2003. In 2002, Paley moved to Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City on business concerning her third comic strip, The Hots, her husband terminated their marriage. Unable to return to either Trivandrum or San Francisco, she moved to Brooklyn, New York. Her personal crisis caused her to see more deeply into the Ramayana, the Indian epic, which she had encountered in India, and motivated her to produce a short animation which combines an episode from the Ramayana with a torch song recorded in 1929 by Annette Hanshaw, Mean To Me. Since then she has added episodes and other material to the work, which is now calledSita Sings the Blues, thus expanding it into feature-length treatment of the Ramayana focused on Rama's wife, Sita, using a variety of animation styles and techniques. Many of the episodes have appeared in recent animation festivals. The finished work premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on Feb. 11, 2008. Due to the obstacles encountered when trying to clear the rights to the Hanshaw's recordings used in the film, Paley began to take a part in the free culture movement. She made an illustrated guide to the idea of free content (Understanding Free Content), wrote and performed the song, Copying Isn't Theft, meant to be freely remixed by other people and plans to publish much of her work, including Nina s Adventures, Fluff, and all original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft license. The website forSita Sings the Blues includes a wiki where its fans contributed translated subtitles for the DVD of the film. Since moving to Brooklyn she has taught in the Design and Technology section of Parsons, part of The New School.