Reading Notes: Ramanya Film

Photo from "Sita Sings the Blues" by Nina Paley on Youtube.

The Sita Sings the Blues: This animated film by Nina Paley is an incredibly creative retelling of the ancient epic in terms of modern themes; I've written up a detailed guide to help you navigate the film, and here is some more information about Nina Paley.

I think it's very interesting to see how this plays out in the film. I will comment on the animated work itself.

I actually kind of love it. This video is not something I really expected to like since most animated versions of written literature become very tacky and obtuse. Instead, I think the stories were made more fruitful and beneficial to my understanding of what was done and said. I think the introduction of the speakers being equally casual about the story was very helpful for my understanding of how the stories came to be. While the written stories we read in the first two weeks weren't bad by any means, short stories that also try to fit in flowery language kind of makes it difficult to take in the whole picture. Breaking up the stories with obviously different styles of music and animation made it easier for my brain to process exactly what is at play. For example, when it became a simple cartoon with pastel colours, I knew that Sita was about to sing about her own experience and it related back to her real story of singing and poetry that I had experienced from the regular reading. I also really appreciated the art direction of the entire video. It is not often that collages of classical works of art are merged together to play characters in the story they represent. Seeing how they were portrayed per art style helped me understand what kind of light they were seen in throughout the epics and why some characters are shown to be more horrific or monstrous. I also really enjoyed the commentary throughout the video. Since we read the stories so fast, it was often hard to understand why some characters did what they did. With the historical knowledge provided to us with the story, it helped me understand the depth of the characters and why the epic was so complicated.

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