NEW YORK -- Amid the documentaries and live-action features at this year's Tribeca Film Festival is a first for the event -- a feature-length, computer-generated animated film rendered entirely by a single animator, working out of a home office.
Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, which makes its North American premiere Friday at the festival, tells two parallel stories: the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana and the breakup of Paley's 21st-century marriage. It does so through four distinct styles of animation, a "greek chorus" of Indonesian shadow puppets and wildly imaginative musical interludes that use authentic 1920s blues recordings to link narratives 3,000 years apart.
Best known in the 1990s for her comic strip Nina's Adventures, Paley turned to animation in 1998, mostly using Flash, and produced the illusion-rich Fetch and the award-winning series of shorts The Stork (which portrayed each "bundle of joy" delivered by the stork as a population bomb).
Over an Indian lunch in the Curry Hill section of Manhattan, Paley talked about tech, heartbreak, rotoscoping and her new film.
Nina Paley mixes the Ramayana, blues songs and her personal tale of heartbreak in Sita Sings the Blues.
Courtesy Nina Paley
Wired: What is your movie about?
Nina Paley: Sita Sings the Blues is a musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The aspect of the story that I focus on is the relationship between Sita and Rama, who are gods incarnated as human beings, and even they can't make their marriage work [laughs].
Wired: And that ties in with the film's second narrative.
Paley: Right, and then there's my story. I'm just an ordinary human, who also can't make her marriage work. And the way that it fails is uncannily similar to the way Rama and Sita's [relationship fails]. Inexplicable yet so familiar. And the question that I asked and the question people still ask is, "Why"? Why did Rama reject Sita? Why did my husband reject me? We don't know why, and we didn't know 3,000 years ago. I like that there's really no way to answer the question, that you have to accept that this is something that happens to a lot of humans.
Wired: And this whole movie was rendered on a laptop?
Paley: I started on a G4 titanium laptop in 2002. I moved to a dual 1.8-GHz tower in 2005, moved again to a 2-by-3-GHz Intel tower December 2007, with which I did the final 1920 x 1080 rendering.
Wired: What software did you use?
Paley: It was animated primarily in Flash. I made some original watercolor paintings by hand, which I scanned and animated in After Effects. I can't believe I'm such a tech booster now, 'cause I used to be a Luddite!
Wired: Mostly in Flash? How many .fla files, for the Flash geeks out there?
Paley: Let's see; say six shots per minute, 80-odd minutes, so it's close to 500 individual scene files.
Wired: I thought I saw some rotoscoping in Sita.
Paley: You did. That was Reena Shah dancing. She did the speaking voice of Sita and she also danced. I videotaped her and traced elements of the dance in Flash. That wasn't an automatic program, it was all by hand.
Wired: The blues that Sita sings are authentic blues recordings?
Paley: Actual 1920s recordings, by a singer named Annette Hanshaw. After my husband dumped me, I was homeless for a little while, sleeping on people's couches, and I stayed in the home of a record collector named Sherwin Dunner, and Annette Hanshaw was in his collection.
Wired: The sound is so clean.
Paley: The sound designer did everything he could, but more than that, her voice on the original recordings is just clear as a bell.
Wired: What was your budget for the film?
Paley: $200,000 in money (plus my time, which I'm valuing at $8 million, because I can). Mostly my own from freelance work, but also from a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. Also donations from wonderful, wonderful people who read about it online.
Wired: The folks at the blog Sepia Mutiny seem to be really into this film.
Paley: I love Sepia Mutiny! They're a bunch of second-generation South Asian-Americans, and they rock. I had no idea that I had an audience in them, but I do.
Wired: Has there been any backlash to the fact that a white woman ...
Paley: I don't even know what white means anymore. I'm actually an Ashkenazi Jew. Which some people would say is not white.
Wired: Well, a non-South Asian. Have you gotten any negative feedback about your doing this?
Paley: Oh, yeah! Plenty of negative feedback! Much less negative than positive feedback, but the negative things are more notable. And I get it both from the far right and the far left. The far right -- they say that they're Hindus but I think it's not right to call them Hindus. They think nonviolence is bullshit: "Don't think you can walk all over Hindus, we'll violate your ass." They send me things letting me know that.
Wired: Great.
Paley: On the far left, there are some very, very privileged people in academia who have reduced all the wondrous complexities of racial relations into, "White people are racist, and non-white people are all victims of white racism." Without actually looking at the work, they've decided that any white person doing a project like this is by definition racist, and it's an example of more neocolonialism. So politics makes strange bedfellows -- they're in bed with the Hindutva nationalists. And nobody's seen the work! I get all this criticism, and none of it's a critique of the work.
Wired: The shadow puppets, the "narrators" explaining the plot of the Ramayana, were the most charming part of the film for me. Who played them?
Paley: Those are friends of mine from India. That's all unscripted, all improvised, and that's their natural speaking voices. They're not scholars -- they were laughing, saying, "Oh, I should have read up on the Ramayana before I came," and I was like, "No, no! I want you to go with what you remember."
Wired: And the scripted parts?
Paley: The actors who did the scripted parts are second-generation South Asians. They're all really good actors. A lot of them are bilingual, and they can do totally authentic accents of their parents, and they can also do really clean American accents. So they ended up doing a hybrid accent to make it audible and clear to American ears.
Wired: You voiced the role of yourself, and that leads to the film's most excruciating scene, in which your character asks your husband to take you back.
Paley: [Laughs.] Isn't that pathetic? I wanted people to feel my pain. And believe me, that's just a little taste of it. [Laughs.] When this sort of thing happens to you, it's so shameful, so humiliating. Which is why I included that scene of Sita sitting there on the banks of the river saying, "I must have committed a terrible sin in a previous life to deserve such suffering." There's always a sense that, if something bad happens to you, that there's something really wrong with you. And I love that even Sita believes this, because she's completely stainless, that's the whole point of her character. I feel that airing this stuff out is the way to take the shame out of it. Plus, pain is funny!
Wired: You've shown that you can take a tiny amount of money and make a computer-generated feature film, as close to single-handedly as possible. What does this bode for animation?
Paley: We're going to see more of this. Mine is one of three independent animated films coming out of New York City this year. Granted this is the only one that one person animated alone, but the others are also marked departures from the film business as usual. And with machinima, you're going to have people making feature films with essentially videogame programs. So, great, we have that to look forward to!
Wired: What do you hope people will take away from this film?
Paley: I hope they laugh! Also I hope that they would actually read the real Ramayana. For a lot of people this is going to be their first encounter with the Ramayana, and it shouldn't be.
