I present to you Sita Sings the Blues:
Animator Nina Paley wants to tell you about the Ramayana, a very old story from India. Particularly, she wants to tell you about Sita, the devoted wife of Rama who never even thinks of another man, despite all the awful things that happen to her.
Nina Paley gives us a few delightful little quirky shorts about the subject. Some of them are genuinely fun and interesting! But then we're introduced to the true villain of the film...
... Nina Paley's ex-husband.
You see, the movie is broken up into different segments. One segment is animated to a real conversation between three Indians as they discuss the Ramayana. Those parts I liked a lot. Another has weird little paper cut-outs re-enacting parts of the story in a silly way. Hey, kind of fun! Another involves Sita singing to recordings by Annette Hanshaw. Oh... okay... weird but sure I'll roll with it. And then we have the short segments that literally illustrate the entire point of the movie: the segments about Nina Paley's personal life.
Every so often, we're treated to squiggly shorts about how Nina's awful husband ignored her and how horrible and miserable he made her feel and how Nina didn't do anything wrong and bla bla bla. These play right after every segment that specifically calls out Rama for being terrible to his own wife Sita. The message is pretty goddamned clear: "MY HUSBAND WAS A BAD PERSON THAT YOU SHOULD BE VERY MAD AT, I AM AN ABUSED LITTLE FLOWER JUST LIKE SITA IN MY CARTOON SEEEEEE?"
I've talked to people about the movie many times, and every time I liken it to a professor giving a lecture on the Odyssey, only to occasionally blurt out something like "AND THEN CIRCE TRICKED THE MEN AND TURNED THEM INTO PIGS, JUST LIKE HOW MY BITCH OF AN EX-WIFE MADE ME FEEL LESS THAN HUMAN!! PITY MEEEEE!!!" before moving on. It's jarring. Very jarring. Look, lady, I can understand how your failed marriage can make you feel like shit, and it's cool that you wanted to use creativity to work your way through it. But spending 3 years animating a movie about another culture's traditions and then using it to try to turn the audience against your ex is lunacy. And it ruins your movie.
Paley ran into legal issues shortly after completing the film, because she didn't bother securing the rights to Hanshaw's music before starting on her epic project. She now spends a lot of time acting like copyright laws are stupid and restrictive and makes cartoons about how everything that can be digitally downloaded should just be free all the time.
