The Ramayana, told by three shadow puppets (who are hilariously
hazy about details) from Sita's point of view: Lord Rama, when to be
crowned to be king, is instead expelled from his kingdom for 14 years, and
huis fiancée Sita insists on going with him. However, they are not
expelled for long when Sita is abducted by the demon king Ravana. Rama
teams up witht he mnkey prince Hanuman to find and free her, but when
Hanuman tracks Sita down and offers to free her just like that, she
insists her fiancé to come and start a war to free her. The whole thing
ends in massacre, but as soon as Sita is back by his side, Rama starts to
doubt she is still pure and insists her to undergo the trial of fire to
prove her purity - which she successfully does. 14 years have passed,
and Rama returns to his kingdom to finally be crowned and rule, with Sita
at his side. Still, when he learns that his subjects have doubts about her
purity he starts to have doubts as well and expells her, even though she's
pregnant with his kids. In the forests she has been expelled to, Sita has
her twin sons and raises them praising Rama. When Rama stumbles upon them
one day he is deeply moved and wants to take them with him, and Sita as
well ... but only if she undergoes yet another trial to prove her purity -
and Sita choses the trial of the earth, in which Mother Earth ultimately
swallows her just to prove her purity. In a parallel story set in
present times, Nina's husband is summoned to India to work there for six
moths, and when she comes to stay with him a few months later, he acts
cold and distanced. Finally, when she's on a work trip to New York, he
dumps her per email ... "The Ramayana told from a
woman's point of view" might sound like a threat to some, a
pseudointellectual and dead boring re-imagining of an oft-old story ...
yet Sita Sings the Blues is anything but, it's a refreshingly funny
piece of animationthat uses an (intentionally) ridiculously incoherent
design-mix to bring its story across, inserts jazz tunes from the 1920's
sung by Annette Hanshaw into its story set in ancient India, and shows a
very ironic approach to the dead serious matter it's dealing with. In
other words, probably one of the most interesting animated features of
recent times, and certainly one of the most entertaining. Highly
recommended. By the way, this film has never been officially
released because of copyright issues with the Annette Hanshaw-tunes, but
fortunately producer/director/writer Nina Paley was nice enough to make it available
to the general public anyways, and for free, too. Go to http://www.sitasingstheblues.com
for more information, and to download it (for free and completely legal)
go to http://www.archive.org/details/Sita_Sings_the_Blues.
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