Sita Sings the Blues

Sita Sings the Blues is a fantastic piece of animation. The entire animation as a piece is rather complicated as it contains two parallel storyline and three different animated styles. Although i felt the combination of different animated styles really lends itself well to the piece, I also was impressed by the modern take on the story of Rama and Sita, not least the choice to tell part of the story through blues songs alone. The story is narrated by three figures and tell part of the story of Rama and Sita, the animation is fairly simplistic in these sections, apart from on the narrators, as the characters appear to be cut out images that are moved as whole images. However the purpose of these sections of the film is to explain simply the story, making the film very accessable for those who don't know the story well or even at all. The second style of Animation is a much more detailed and individual take on the design of the characters from the story of Rama and Sita, and although they look different to the same characters they represent in the narration they look similar enough to avoid confusion. The really interesting feature is the choice to set it musically to a soundtrack of blues songs to tell the story from Sita's point of view. The final style of animation is also the parrallel story which takes place in modern times in a combination of the western world and india, and as such has a very different style of animation to the other areas of the film. The parrallel story tells the story of Rama and Sita in a modern context. As a result the Animated film does wonders for an old tale, in modernising the original story with more recent music and also doing a completely modernised version.

I have been concentrating some what on looking at the sound in animation at the moment and Sita Sings the Blues really intrigues me from this point of view, the choice to tell a story in the style of a musical but with songs that where written hundreds of years afterwards is an inspired idea. And the choice of blues songs do really help to convery Sita's emotions and the story. Whilst it doesn't do anything as daring as having a feature length film with no dialogue for the first forty minutes, Sita Sings the Blues is a very different approach to telling classic tale and uses sound superbly