Sita Sings the Blues (2008, USA)

Sita Sings the Blues is writer/director/producer/editor/pretty much everything else-r Nina Paley’s semi-autobiographical take on the Hindu Ramayana. It’s an audacious combination of at least five different animation styles, as Paley weaves four primary threads together – sketchily-drawn moments from her real-life break-up with husband Dave, three comical Balinese shadow puppets narrating segments of the Ramayana, a Sita-heavy Ramayana done in the style of Hindu popular iconography, and a computer-generated vision of Sita and Rama where Sita sings the tunes of 1920’s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw. Along the way there are some obvious parallels between the story of Nina and Dave and that of Sita and Rama – journeys, betrayal, self-sacrifice and abandonment – as well as some cheeky takes on the vagaries of Hindu myth (I particularly liked the bit where the shadow puppets argue about the spelling and pronunciation of various names) and common sites in the battle of the sexes.

For the amount of animation and subject matter that Paley crams into Sita, I was often shocked that the bulk of it works as well as it does. With the exception of one sequence after Dave dumps Nina, the different visual styles work well together, and Paley is smart to update the narrated and iconographic segments with contemporized language, while also imbuing the computerized song sequences with multiple layers of visual puns and strong characterizations – Sita is Betty Boop-ized, Rama looks like a thick-skulled college jock, and Hanuman gets gorilla DNA. Though the wrap-up is a little bit of a let down, it’s hard to quibble with what Paley has accomplished with Sita Sings the Blues. Sucks to be Dave.