Review of Sita Sings the Blues (2008) by Kenneth L — 23 Jun 2011

Well, I've definitely never seen another movie like this one. This is an astonishingly weird but likable film. The concept is a little hard to condense: it's an independent animated musical retelling of the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, fused with an account of the animator/director Nina Paley's divorce. It is made with an extremely eclectic, postmodern mix of styles that reminded me, at various points, of newspaper comics;the TV show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; Terry Gilliam's animation for Monty Python; traditional Sanskrit imagery; Betty Boop; the video game Little Big Planet; Yellow Submarine; and what I imagine an acid trip is like, never having experience one. Not that it's ripping off all or, indeed, any of these things - it just exhibits so many different types of style that my mind was scrambling for comparisons.

The movie opens with a somewhat abstract sequence so bizarre that I honestly half-wondered if some stealthy ninja hadn't put LSD in my Coke Zero. But then it settled into a recognizable narrative format, which broke down into four rotating parts. In the first, we see a cartoon version of Nina Paley's divorce from her husband; this section was made with hand-drawn computer tablet animation, and has that wavy-line effect of Dr. Katz. In the second, we hear a three-way conversation between three Indian people recounting the narrative of the Ramayana, and see them represented as shadow puppets while images enact what they are describing behind them. In the third, animated versions of what look like traditional renderings of the characters speak their own dialogue to advance the story. And in the fourth, which makes up more of the film than any other single part, we see these charmingly cartoonish versions of the characters enacting the story as the character of Sita sings the songs of 1920s singer Annette Hanshaw (these are actually recordings of Hanshaw being ventriloquized through Sita). The movie keeps cycling through these four sections until reaches the end of Nina's story and of the Ramayana's.

The version of the Ramayana told here is no doubt a simplified, Cliff's-Notes-y version, but I got the feeling that it was true to the outlines of the story. Each of the animation styles employed is charming in its own way, but I definitely liked the musical sections best. Annette Hanshaw's music is fantastic, and the way each song fit into the narrative seemed appropriate. It's difficult to review the movie in conventional terms, since it's so thoroughly unconventional. The voice acting in the present-day sections of the film is really bad, but it hardly matters. I wasn't profoundly emotionally moved by the movie, but it more than made up for that with sheer dazzle and originality. I think the movie is best approached with no particular expectations; just go in and let it do its thing on its own idiosyncratic terms, and I think you'll enjoy what you see, though you may have a hard time explaining exactly why.