March 15, 2009

Watching Sita Sings the Blues, take 1

You may have heard of this going around el blogosphere, a short animated movie called Sita Sings the Blues. This is the movie here and the page about the movie here.

So I know ABOUT it and I have a general idea of what it's about, and I'll tell you. It is the story of Nina Paley, who, using the story of the Ramayana and jazz singer Anne Hanshaw, relates the story of her divorce.

Now, I started writing this post a while ago because I wanted to give the movie a fair shake. It's not even that long, bout an hour and thirty. I took off my special Gender & Race goggles and watched it like any ol' thing. I should have put them on.

But in a week I have not been able to get past 30 minutes into this movie. Uh when I do I'll let you know, but first let me explain why:

Animation

This has been irritating me to death. The posters I saw showed a pretty cute, simplistic, geometric style & it was colorful, I thought, "Mkay I can work with that". But it's not like that throughout the movie...and I'd be okay with that if it weren't for the fact that while we're looking at Nina's real life it's this weird sketchy style that reminds me of a child's drawings. Fine. Then it switches up again with the shadow puppets and their narration to a sort of cut out style. THEN the cutsey geo look. I was fine with this for most of my time watching but due to the structure the animation changed up so much that I just found myself getting irate.

But that wasn't as bothersome as the

Structure

Okay so I said I only watched 30 minutes of it so I can't say too much other than...damn this irritated me. It didn't flow. After about 10 minutes I ceased completely to feel the shadow puppet Greek Chorus. The way they explained the Ramayana--already in a dumbed down form anyway--just didn't work with what was happening. Holding up the story every now and then to have amusing banter and commentary quickly became unnecessary. And switching back and forth between the Ramayana story and Nina's story...I just thought it could have gone better. At some points if it weren't for the music I'd have been lost on what Nina was trying to get across exactly and I don't think that would have happened if the stories had just been able to intertwine without the excessive use of our little shadowy greek chorus.

Then there's the

Story

Ehh. Again I didn't watch the whole film so I can't go all up into this, but I felt a little weird seeing the Ramayana being related to this divorce. That's on a really basic level and I see where she's going with this, and I think it's a pretty interesting idea, it's just the execution that's making me want to cut someone's face up. With a razor.

So in all...I want to try to get through the rest of this over the weekend and hopefully my feelings will change, because I WANT to like it. Plus, apparently I'm grounded now so I'll need something to do *blink*

Yes, you heard me. Grounded. GROUNDED.

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