Nina Paley (b. 1968, in the US) is a long-time veteran of syndicated comic strips, having created Fluff (Universal Press Syndicate), The Hots (King Features) and her own alternative weekly Nina’s Adventures. In 1998 she began making independent animated festival films, including the controversial yet popular environmental short film The Stork. In 2002 Nina followed her then husband to Thiruvananthapuram in India’s southern state of Kerala, where she read her first Ramayana. This inspired her first feature Sita Sings the Blues, which she animated and produced single-handedly over the course of five years on a home computer. Presently, Nina teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow.
Malashri Lal (ML): Sita Sings the Blues has been immensely successful in both the US and UK.
Nina Paley (NP): But it hasn’t been released in either country yet! In fact, it’s having its North American premiere this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. So far, the complete feature has only been seen at the Berlinale in Germany and the NatFilm festival in Denmark. And no, I haven’t made any money yet; I’m still spending my own money to make film prints, do sub-titles, ship things . . .
ML: We understand from interviews that your personal experience led to your reading Sita’s story in a contemporary light. How can the film reach out to women in India across cultural differences?
NP: That is a good question. I can’t tell you how curious I am to discover how the film will be received in India—or if it will get shown there at all. Some people may love it, some may hate it. Every viewer brings his/her own experience and perspective to a film, and every interpretation is valid, be it critical or adulatory. We can only wait and see.
ML: Sita has traditionally been revered as a figure of ideal wifehood, though new and critical opinions are calling attention to the denial of ‘choice’ in several episodes of her life. In particular, the agni pariksha sequence calls for a review in terms of a feminist understanding of woman’s agency and action. Do you think Sita in the Ramayana was a passive person, or do you believe that it was merely a patriarchal interpretation which highlighted the submissive aspects of her character?
NP: The latter—I do not see Sita as passive. The agni pariksha I see as a metaphor for grief. I wanted to kill myself when my husband dumped me, and the unbearable pain was like fire—I thought it was going to kill me and I’m still kind of amazed it didn’t. Sita’s walk through fire is actually an active expression of a heartbreak experience. In this way Sita is far more active than most of us. In fact, Sita is a model for expressing what we often repress. She loves Rama actively, without censure or shame or any limits. And when he breaks her heart, she expresses her pain with her whole being. How many of us mere mortals can do that?
ML: What remedial measures did you take in your version to emphasize the strength of Sita?
NP: I am not trying to take any ‘remedial measures’; I am just showing it like I see it. I think Annette Hanshaw’s voice is the best emphasis of Sita’s strength: strength in vulnerability, honesty and yes, purity. Hanshaw’s voice rings clear as a bell after almost a century, and its sweetness is devastating. Sita’s ferocious love for Rama is an unstoppable force, a true source of power, if not empowerment. At the end, Sita’s own power takes the fore, when she calls on Mother Earth to take her back into her womb. Here she displays supernatural powers exceeding those of any other mortal character, even Rama. But this is all there in the Valmiki text; I am not making it up.
ML: What made you choose animation as the innovative method of portraying Sita’s story in a modern context?
NP: I’m an animator. I used the skills and tools at my disposal to tell the story.
ML: Using shadow puppets is another highly effective device as it reminds the viewers of the popularity of the Ramayana in vast areas of Asia. Did the creative and production work involve researchers from south and south-east Asian countries?
NP: The only researcher on the production was me! I was also the writer, producer, director, designer and crew. But it’s not hard to find reference to shadow puppets. A friend bought me a few in Indonesia, and I found pictures of shadow puppets from Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and India in books and online.
ML: I am intrigued by your choice of colours: Sita wears pink, and Rama is painted blue. This is a very elemental colour coding for the male and the female. Rama is described to be in the lineage of Vishnu and blue could be justified from that viewpoint. Sita’s wearing of baby pink from the beginning to the end of her tragic story seems to make an ironic comment on the notion of female innocence as such. Do you agree? What would be your interpretation of the colours you use?
NP: Sita is called ‘The Ideal Woman’ and Rama ‘The Ideal Man’. So, in their designs I wanted to emphasize Sita’s female-ness and Rama’s male-ness in every possible way, to a ridiculous extent. In the West, pink is considered a colour for girls and blue for boys, and this did fit in nicely with Rama’s blue visage in many traditional paintings. More than the colours, the shapes emphasize gender. Sita’s hourglass shape is impossible to achieve; if I had made her waist any thinner, I would have had to bisect her. Likewise, I gave Rama enormous biceps and an impossibly broad chest. The characters’ silhouettes unmistakably say ‘female’ and ‘male’.
Ideal doesn’t just mean a ‘desirable role model’. It has other meanings, as in ‘Platonic ideal’—an abstract essence. These extreme poles of masculinity and femininity are how I see Rama and Sita, and how I convey them in both the narrative and the art.
ML: Sita Sings the Blues blurs the distinction between the tragic story of the epic and the comedy of modern lives, especially of women caught in the binds of marital conventions.
NP: To be clear, Sita Sings the Blues isn’t a critique of marriage or sexist social conventions: it is an anguished critique of romantic love itself. I didn’t love my rejecting husband because society told me to. What blew my mind while reading various Ramayanas in the midst of my own break-up was how primal and universal the problems of love are, and have always been. I do not see Sita as a victim of society. She was not ‘forced’ to be loyal to Rama. She could have stayed at the palace during his forest exile; she could have walked away when he rejected her in Lanka (when he declares, ‘You are free to go wherever you want’; he also gives her permission to remarry). It was Sita’s essential nature to love Rama, regardless of what the rest of the society expected of her. At the end, when she finally gives up on him, her life can end. The way I see it, she attains moksha at that point—liberation not only from her congenital love for a man who breaks her heart, but from all of life’s sucker punches.
ML: Did the mix of technology that you used offer this contrast better than conventional cinema or theatre?
NP: I used animation because I’m an animator. I just wanted to tell this story, using the skills and sensibility I have.
ML: In India, some of the Rama Lila performances enacted at Dussehra attempt to impart a contemporary slant to the story but they may not innovate in any extreme form because the context is religious. Do you see your film as rewriting religion or creating a secular text based on religion? Maybe you have another category in mind that you wish to describe?
NP: I’m certainly not rewriting religion. I understand that for Hindus, the Ramayana is a religious text, but the Ramayana belongs to hundreds of millions of non-Hindus too, and has for centuries. It belongs to Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia, Buddhists in Thailand and Cambodia, and to everyone in India regardless of religion. My Christian friend in Kerala told me her family always exhorted her to ‘be like Sita!’ The Ramayana was clearly important to her and her family, but was it a religious text for them? I don’t think so. So a secular interpretation of the Ramayana is nothing new at all.
Check out this You Tube link for the Sita Sings the Blues!
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