Nina Paley
“Nina Paley is a cartoonist and animator who refers to herself as ‘America’s Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist’. She’s been working for more than twenty years first as a cartoonist and then as an animator but it’s her last project, the animated feature film “Sita Sings the Blues” has garnered her the most attention of her career.
The feat of writing, directing, animating and producing a feature length film is impressive in itself, but it’s also one of the best animated films of recent years. Roger Ebert wrote that the film was “astonishingly original.”
Sita Sings the Blues
Sita Sings the Blues is based on a story from the Hindu epic “The Ramayana,” is also notable because Paley released the film under a “copyleft” license from the Creative Commons Foundation. The film has had many weeks run in theatres in New York City and elsewhere.
Nina’s Adventures
In 1988, at the tender age of 20, Nina left her hometown of Urbana, IL, for Santa Cruz California to fulfill a naive dream of becoming a new-age, crystal-wielding hippie. Instead, she became a cynical cartoonist. ‘Nina’s Adventures’, her semi-autobiographical, often experimental, not-quite-underground alternative weekly comic strip, first appeared in the Santa Cruz Comic News and soon spread to the LA Reader, Comic Relief Magazine, the Funny Times, and the San Francisco Examiner.
She also created two solo “alternative” comic books for Dark Horse Comics, and various shorter pieces were published in anthologies by Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, the feminist Laugh Lines Press, and Kitchen Sink Press. Her weeklies were published in two paperback collections, ‘Depression is Fun’ and ‘Nina’s Adventures‘, and appeared in a large Japanese artist volume, Jarebong.
‘Nina’s Adventures’ was a labour of love, but it didn’t pay the rent. After 7 years she succumbed to courtship by major syndicates, releasing her first mainstream daily, ‘Fluff’, with Universal Press Syndicate. Fluff enjoyed a modest run in about 40 mainstream newspapers worldwide, but the monotony of drawing the same characters, the same way, every day, with no significant experimentation, led to premature comics burn-out. After two long years she resigned. But her boredom with comics drove her to seek thrills in a more challenging medium, animation.
Subject Matter
Her subject matter is controversial. While she has been greatly encouraged by the overwhelming positive response from desis (South Asian expatriates), some viewers in India have been outraged. The Ramayana is a perplexing tale, and Sita is its most misunderstood character. I’ve heard from more than one Hindu American woman that ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ is the first Ramayana retelling that offers them a real connection to Sita.
Nina’s retelling is also humorous, which some people interpret as irreverent, and therefore an affront. Not that this has any bearing on her work; as she learned from The Stork, the greater the risks in art, the greater the rewards. She has nothing but love and admiration for her source material now. She hopes to show how the genius of the Ramayana transcends societies and generations, and is as relevant today as it was 3,000 years ago.”
