Best movie of this year hands down!

Boring

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

May be it's because I know the Ramayana thoroughly and have been through so many discussions about different aspects of it, problems in it (Every single thing in the film including those jokes), I felt bored watching this film. Another reason may be the different animation techniques used, which I've only seen in low-quality films or ancient illustrations. I do appreciate the effort by the director who worked on every aspect of the film, that in itself is a great achievement but the thing is you can tell it by watching the film.

First the good parts of the movie were the music sung beautifully and the animation done in a pastiche of styles.The bad parts were the story itself which was a projection of the authors' sense of victimhood onto the story of Rama. Nina and her boyfriend are living in domestic bliss with their cat in San Francisco when he gets a contract in India. Though she misses him greatly he's enjoying his time there and even extends his stay away from her. She leaves her comfortable apartment and cat to follow him to India only to be unceremoniously dumped. Life is a drag.She ends up in a cold apartment in New York reminiscing about the good old days and reading the Ramayana for some reason. Things now become clear to her as the book, rather than being the Story of Rama venerated for millennia, is really the Story of Sita, reflecting the eternal suffering of women at the hands of unfeeling men. Such as perhaps ... the author ??The movie ends with Nina's revenge on India for stealing away her boyfriend by having the Hindu God Vishnu obsequiously massaging the feet of his wife. ha,ha :{This exercise in self pity has certainly been rewarding for the author. For the rest of us however, this type of self centeredness and trivialization of another culture's deeply held beliefs are one of the reasons why Americans are viewed with justifiable suspicion and hostility in the cultural realm.

This wonderfully ambitious and ingenious cartoon is full of interesting ideas and various animation styles. But it never fully clicked with me, and I'm afraid it's because it's a too too ambitious and ingenious. The movie tells parallel stories, one an ancient Indian legend of Rama and his wife Sita, the other of the animator's relationship. The latter is very simple, a series of short scenes down in a scrawled style of animation. But Sita's story is another thing entirely. The story is narrated by three Indian friends of the animator who tell the story from memory, often disagreeing about what happened and editorializing over the story. The are very entertaining, and animated with traditional Indian art.The stories they describe are then illustrated in a different animated style that is the least memorable of the movie (although not bad).Then the most significant part of the story is recounted, using a beautiful, lush style of animation, through the use of a song. The songs are sung by some old-time torch singer and are very good.There are also a couple of times when the animation does some weird psychedelic stuff, which didn't seem to match anything else in the movie.While the exploration of whether men deserve the sort of unconditional love is interesting, and much of this is amusing, there is a certain unsettled quality to it. It is as though the director had a lot of ideas and wanted to do them all right now in case she never got together the money to do another movie. I'm not saying what she did was wrong, and I certainly understand why some people really love this movie, but for me it was just not as good as the movie I was expecting based on the opening sequence.

I wonder what Dave is thinking now....,If his goal was to seek immortality,...he chose the right method, and the right spouse to dump. For Nina Paley has made a masterpiece of animation that has it all: clear, beautiful, vibrant, witty,ironic tragic that equates Dave with Rama and herself with Sita. Its bound to be played and remembered for years after Dave is pushing up the daisies. Two parallel stories: Ninas and Sitas interwoven provide us with fabulous entertainment and a cautionary tale , Nina with her revenge, and Dave with a wish he'd been nicer.. WE know the story now..of Sitas abduction, her devotion and Ramas obsession with purity. But its told by a modern woman, so has that feminist edge. Sita is too sweet to rebuke Rama his injustice, so Nina steps in, and when Sitas children sing the praises of Ram, Nina has them tell it like it is.... Such a variety of animation, as if one kind alone couldn't tell her story. Unlike much American animation which has lots of money behind it but little inspiration, this one is refreshingly mature,worthy of its subject, and yet can appeal to children: nothing false, cloying, ..just real feeling...Interestingly, Paley uses simple line drawings making her own story the more cartoonish, as if it was too painful to treat dramatically, and seems to sublimate it into Sitas story.When she learns dave has dumped her, her cry is cartoonish,...cockroaches replace the cat as her companions, as her life crumbles,,,.her life has gone dark, and so its fitting that at Ninas lowest point a dark figure dances amidst the flames.Throughout the beautiful voice of Annette Hanshaw, speaks for Sita, Nina and others dumped and unwanted: whose spouses have been mean to them.