Sita Sings the Blues Now on YouTube

Nina Paley, a self-taught ani­ma­tor, released in 2008 an 82-minute ani­mat­ed film, Sita Sings the Blues, that min­gles the clas­sic Indi­an myth, The Ramayana, with con­tem­po­rary auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal events, and it’s all set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Han­shaw. The film, which launched the San Fran­cis­co Inter­na­tion­al Ani­ma­tion Fes­ti­val, has won awards and gath­ered a lot of fans. In late Feb­ru­ary, Paley hand­ed the film over to the pub­lic, releas­ing it under a Cre­ative Com­mons license (down­load it here). And she has now made it avail­able on YouTube. Hence the visu­al­ly stun­ning film above. Nat­u­ral­ly, we’ve added Sita Sings the Blues to our col­lec­tion of YouTube favorites.

In the mean­time, check out our new col­lec­tion, 30 Places to Watch Free Movies Online


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Comments (6)
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  • sue c ogden says:

    As an inter­est­ed per­son on the sub­ject of Hin­duism mythol­o­gy and ani­ma­tion and India I watched, lis­tened and remem­bered how much I love the old blues songs too! What a fab­u­lous film and a won­der­ful mind to put all of that togeth­er!
    Applause, applause from me and I bought the DVD!
    Hap­py future to the artists!

  • JulianKaruk says:

    I’ve start­ed to watch Sita and each time I was inter­rupt­ed after 15 or 20 min­utes. Tonight I watched it all and it was just fab­u­lous. Final­ly. I watched inter­views with Paley hear­ing the back­sto­ry to the ani­ma­tion which real­ly adds a spice as well. Love it. Yay.

  • JulianKaruk says:

    I’ve start­ed to watch Sita and each time I was inter­rupt­ed after 15 or 20 min­utes. Tonight I watched it all and it was just fab­u­lous. Final­ly. I watched inter­views with Paley hear­ing the back­sto­ry to the ani­ma­tion which real­ly adds a spice as well. Love it. Yay.

  • Susiecrmchs says:

    A long time after falling in love and own­ing the film which I watch occa­sion­al­ly now just for the music, I also pur­chased a Sita doll made in India by “needy” women.…lovely lit­tle thing Sitaing on my shelf!

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