It was surprising to hear Colleen rave about an animated film when she herself has said that animation is not her thing but she was very impressed with Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues.
We posted the trailer a few months back when the film was making the festival rounds but it looks like Paley’s film will not have to wait to find an audience on DVD.
Andrew will be happy to know that he’ll have a chance to see it sooner rather than later. After much fanangling with the rights, thirteen, a public broadcaster out of New York City, has managed to acquire rights to the film which is now available under creative commons licensing. The result? The rest of us benefit from the film’s availability online.
Sita Sings the Blues is streaming for free at Reel 13, the broadcasters blog, and though there’s no apparent “expiry date”, I urge you to check it sooner rather than later because who knows how long this opportunity will stick around. To make life that much better, it’s available to everyone not just American IPs.
I know what I’m doing when I get home tonight…(right after my screening of Pontypool (our review)).
If you want to watch it onl1ne for free,...
So I watched the first 35 minutes or so (will have to finish later) and I’m not sure what I think about it. I love the music and I like the different types of animation utilized, but I don’t like the way the story is told. I don’t like how un-serious the thing is taken. Not that the movie has to be a super melo-drama, but it’s almost told like a joke. I get that it’s a fable, but the “three people around the water cooler” re-telling the story and not really knowing exactly what they’re talking about and making jokes, etc. Then some of the characters and voices are depicted like whacky caricatures as though they’re on Adult Swim or something. Humor is fine (see Persepolis), but I don’t like the whackiness of the whole thing.
Still, I do like it for the other reasons. Again, the music is awesome.
Comment by Andrew James — February 28, 2009
I did like the movie a lot, but I didn’t care much for the modern vignette, which of course turns out to be somewhat autobiographical on the part of the Director/Animator.
I love the vocal stylings of Annette Hanshaw and the visuals are to die for in this movie. The shifting images of Rama and Sita underscore just how many times those stories have been told and morphed over time. I guess Paley was striving for universal with the ‘modern’ thread, but it felt clumsily added in a way to stretch the movie out to feature length as much as anything else. I found myself groaning ever time it cut to New York or San Francisco.
Other than that, what a fabulous film.
Comment by kurt — February 28, 2009
Comment by kurt — March 1, 2009
Comment by Marina Antunes — March 1, 2009
Comment by Marina Antunes — March 2, 2009
Comment by Andrew James — March 2, 2009