The cartoonist Nina Paley turned filmmaker with Sita Sings the Blues, an eye-popping, brightly colored animated feature that throws together the three-thousand year-old Indian myth the Ramayana, the Boopish singing of the 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw, and the director's own sad story of the breakup of her marriage. In 2002, Paley's husband decamped from their San Francisco home to a job in India, where, after some time had passed, he deigned to let her join him. It was while she was living in India that Paley discovered the Ramayana and began to think that she could use it as a taking-off place for a comic strip. But when Paley was on a business trip to Manhattan, her husband, who sounds as if he just might possibly be someone who it would be fun to see get kicked to death, informed her by e-mail that he thought the marriage was over and that she shouldn't bother coming back. Paley subsequently fueled her bewilderment and depression into a short film, Trial by Fire, whose success on the festival circuit emboldened her to expand it until it had grown into the 82-minute Sita. "It sounds dumb", Paley recently told Margy Rochlin, "but the movie wanted to get made."
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