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Arts & Entertainment

Sita Sings the Blues in Nina Paley's Wonderful Animation

Short: Fetch! (5 mins)

A man plays fetch with his dog in this Nina Paley short. The game is complicated by the fact that they live in a world chock full of optical illusions.

Feature: Sita Sings The Blues: (82 mins)

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San Francisco-based director/animator Nina Paley blends her own life story, the life story of the heroine of the epic Hinu tale "The Ramayana of Valmiki", and the jazz vocals of the 1920's singer Annette Hanshaw to create a masterpiece.

The movie utilizes a different style of animation for each type of scene:  Irreverent Indonesian shadow puppets provide narration. A curvaceous Betty Boop-like Sita takes center stage when she sings the blues.  Battle scenes are rendered either in a style reminiscent of the Yellow submarine or as Mughal drawings from ancient Hindu texts. Paley's own life is rendered as fuzzy cartoon squiggles.  The musical score jumps between traditional Indian instrumentals to the 1920s American Jazz used to give Sita voice when she feels blue.

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Sound confusing?  Roger Ebert of the Chicago-Sun Times freely admits he was put off when he read the description of the film  and had to be talked into watching it.  When he did he was blown away.

 "I put on the DVD and start watching. I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. ...  To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle."

Don't make the mistake Roger almost did. Come see this miracle when the Coastside Film Society screens it!  It boasts battle scenes that put modern anime to shame, a mixed Indian and classical American Jazz soundtrack that will thrill, two heartbreaking tales of love gone wrong, artistic flourishes that will amaze, enough humor to keep both young and old amused, and opening credits that will blow you away.

"Ms. Paley did everything in this an amazingly eclectic, tour de force by herself. The ingenuity .. is dazzling -- and a lot of fun." A. O. SCOTT New York Times

Nina Paley is an amazing animator, a syndicated comic strip artist, a professor at Parsons School of Design, and a Guggenheim Fellow who creates masterworks all by herself.  She "is half revelation, half revolution. A Western woman who took an Eastern story and with a personal computer single-handedly animated a full-length film that received accolades from Roger Ebert and attacks from conservative Hindus, a story that morphed into a protracted fight with Sony and others about copyrights, catapulting the artist into an Internet hero and her struggle into a cause celebre for Creative Commons, a flexible rights model being evolved to meet the needs of a digital era. Come as we share the tale, the adventure, the trials of Nina Paley's Ramayana." Lavina Melwani, Hinduism Today

The famous animation scholar Karl Cohen will introduce the films and answer questions from the audience.

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