Sita Sings the Blues screens at Plaza Theatre tonight
March 11, 2009 at 1:40 pm by Jeremy Abernathy in Events, movies & tvThe Plaza Theatre and ASIFA-Atlanta host a one-night screening of Sita Sings the Blues tonight at 7:30 p.m. The animation news blog, Cartoon Brew, calls Nina Paley’s film a “startlingly original mashup of Indian mythology, contemporary heartbreak, and 1920s American jazz.” Plus — Roger Ebert (of all people) writes:
Paley works entirely in 2-D with strict rules, so that characters remain within their own plane, which overlaps with others. This sounds like a limitation. Actually, it is the source of much amusement. Comedy often depends on the device of establishing unbreakable rules and then finding ways to cheat on them and surprise you. The laughs Paley gets here with 2-D would be the envy of an animator in 3-D. She discovers dimensions where none exist.
As the title implies, much of the charm of Sita Sings the Blues is due to its music, a fact that’s brought both acclaim and frustration to its creator. Paley, whose blog is taglined “America’s Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist,” created the film without licensing the songs under copyright. Although she’s experimenting with alternative distribution methods (to comply with current law), the project is still largely a work of love. On the film’s official website, Paley explicitly invites her fans to “please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show” as much as we’d like.
March 12th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Thank you SO much for posting about this!! We put a ton of work into arranging showing of the film, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate a well-researched and well-written post like this to help get the word out.
It was a great show- Plaza was incredibly helpful in so many ways, and the audience was attentive and, judging from their laughter and the comments after, enjoyed the film a whole lot.
It went down like this: I did a very brief introduction, then we showed the trailer for “Monster Road”, which is playing at the Center for Puppetry Arts on March 28th (with a director Q&A too!).
Next we showed a special video introduction by Nina Paley, recorded specially for this screening. Then we showed “Sita Sings the Blues”!
Thank you again!
-Brett W. Thompson, President of ASIFA-Atlanta