Week 5 Reading A: Ramayana - Sita Sings the Blues movie

File:05.RamSitaGods.png
Sita Sings the Blues on Wikimedia

For this week’s version of the Ramayana, I watched the movie Sita Sings the Blues on YouTube. The movie was highly entertaining, and definitely different than I thought that it would be. It opens with Lakshmi coming out of the sea and dancing to a peacock phonograph playing the blues. Then, several key Hindu characters are introduced floating in the cosmos, including Shiva, Brahma, Lakshmi, Surya, Chandra, Bhumi, and the heart of the universe which is beating. It then goes into a modern day setting in San Francisco, in which a regular man gets sent to India for his job. After that, Sita begins singing some blues songs about her love for Rama and how happy she is with him.
The video is interesting in that the style of the animation changes drastically throughout. In just the first twenty or so minutes, Sita and Rama are illustrated in three different styles, so this video is definitely not boring. There is also a comical aspect to the video, and it is narrated by three characters. These characters sounds as if they are just three Indian people discussing the Ramayana. They forget exact events and names, and it is funny because their contribution gives off a “shouldn’t you know this?” feeling. It is clear that the Ramayana is a part of their culture and that they learned a lot about it when they were young. The only bad thing about the setup of this movie is that it seems like you already need a little previous knowledge of the Ramayana in order to keep up. The last thing about the first part of this video that is important to mention is the use of the blues to act out the Ramayana. The blues really have nothing to do with this Indian epic, but it is a good way to shed new light on an old tale, and a good way to entertain and educate a different group of people.
Something that I can take away from this movie is to branch out with style, setting, characters, and plot. As long as I keep the same underlying tone or basic plot in my own stories, the similarities between my stories and the original that I have written from should come through.

You can access the film here: Sita Sings the Blues.

Comments

  1. Kayleigh ZemaitisSeptember 21, 2017 at 8:23 PM

    This was also the new version of the Ramayana that I chose to watch! I thought it was so fun to see the characters in this way! I agree that this film emphasized that we need to branch out in our retelling! It also shows how many various different things we can do to branch out. Just as you said, setting is a really interesting thing to change about a story. I also focus on changing some aspect of the characters, but I want to start doing other things as well!

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