a movie

[egypturnash]

Nina Paley's one-woman feature cartoon Sita Sings The Blues is awesome. You should download it*, watch it, and paypal her a few bucks. (Due to the songs she used being in Copyright Jail even though it's old enough that it should be PD, she can't distribute it through normal channels; this is a saga as long and convoluted as the story behind her deciding to make this movie, or as its original source material, the Ramayana.

It's animated entirely in Flash, using all the tricks John taught me to avoid when possible - it's flat, it's clearly a work of Flash, it's made with maybe two dozen individual pieces per character. And yet it is beautiful, compelling, and moving. Well worth the time it'll take to download. It's alternately mocking and reverent of its source material - which is, IMHO, how we cartoonists show reverence.

* that link goes to the torrent my machine is still sharing on; you can also find higher- and lower-res torrents, or get an http download from archive.org.

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Sammi had pointed it out to me 'way back when while I was talking about how cool it would be to do a Ramayana animation, and I liked it a lot! It's really cool.

[melskunk.livejournal.com]

I've watched it a few times. It's very enjoyable :)

Hmm, I need a Sita icon

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

We all do. =};-3

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Ya. I've loved Nina Paley for a long time. She used to do a a comic strip when she lived in Santa Cruz a million years ago. I think I still have the "Home home on the rag" song she did.

I've also got 'Ninavision' (a DVD of her shorts) and she's got a couple of pieces on the "New York Animators" discs I have.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

It's a wonderful work, and I so wish Ms. Paley could have been able to show it through normal channels.

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

I think the flat-Flash style worked well in many scenes, gave it the feel of painted tapestries in some of them. The music stood out too, both the blues and the bhangra-rock in the chapter openings. I should grab a torrent of it, I only saw it on streaming.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Since Comcast breaks all torrents trying to pass through their system, I'm grabbing it from Archive.org.

But seriously, this is what BitTorrent was meant for.

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

In what way do they break them? I thought they'd stopped that so much, or at least stopped blocking it. Do they just make it slower to get?
I ask only because I'm on Comcast and haven't noticed an appreciable difference in torrents in the last year or so. Though, I'm using some encryption and other things via muTorrent, which might get around it partly.

[zeeth_kyrah]

I'm pretty sure that encryption would do it.

As of last year, they were still doing deep packet inspection, and still sending reset packets between torrent sharers. But an encrypted packet is a little harder to identify, so they probably aren't doing as much about those.