Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Nina Paley

Nina Paley

Drawn! first reported on Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues in 2005. Back then, it was just another cute thing someone was doing online. Now it’s a FREE feature length film. As you can see from these two screenshots, it’s a rich blend of many styles – at least five – that quite effectively retell the ancient myth. And it’s funny.

When I was about five years old it was 1975 and my hippie-inflected West Coast upbringing meant that I was given comic books of not Disney, not Marvel, not Archie, but…. Ramayana, straight off the presses from India. So I have been familiar with the story since forever, and I was a wee bit critical, having also been given a feminist upbringing. So when I first watched portions of Paley’s version in 2006 I was charmed but also a little skeptical about the value of rehashing the famous epic love story that celebrates faithful, blind love despite abuse, especially in a cartoon starring a heroine with boobs up to her neck and a waistline the size of her spine.

I’m so thrilled to report that Paley’s film does not gloss the difficult parts of the narrative and traditional gender roles at all. In fact, it can be understood as a hugely critical commentary, even a bit of a caricature of ideal beauty and duty. At the same time, its loving visual treatment upholds a reading of the Ramayana as an uplifting cautionary tale and even as a reminder that ideals are beautiful things, if you don’t get too carried away. Like all traditional tales, there is a lot of room for philosophical reflection.

And it’s such eye candy.

But even with all that, perhaps its most interesting feature is that it also represents one of the biggest challenges to how we think about copyright that we’ve seen yet. Here’s a news report on that. At stake here: the clash of folk culture and commercial culture – and how the internet can subvert or sponsor both.