Featured Film: Sita Sings the Blues

To hear the brief synopsis of Sita Sings the Blues, "an animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw," you might register a mild curiosity. Faint intrigue, perhaps. It's a peculiar pairing of cultures, sure, but hardly one to send you hurtling towards the cineplex.
Therein, however, lies the slight of hand of so much great art. Because to see this tale burst forth from the screen, each minute saturated with passion and creativity, originality and humor, is to witness the full and glorious potential of what might, in lesser hands, have remained a mere novelty. Like The Triplets of Belville or Waltz With Bashir before it, Sita Sings the Blues shows us what we didn't even realize we were missing: genuinely iconoclastic explorations of animation in contemporary filmmaking. This playful journey of sound and vision takes us from the off-the-cuff banter of three Indonesian shadow puppets trying to recall childhood memories of the Ramayana tale to the Squigglevisiony depictions of the writer/director's own present day romantic travails; the psychedelic rotoscoped dance sequence midway through to the distinctive Flash aesthetic employed when the curvaceous Betty Boop-styled Sita reinterprets the Annette Hanshaw back-catalog.
Check out the film's website for more information on the Creative Commons license that allows you to view it for free!