For Kwanzoo’s second podcast, we talked to cartoonist and animator Nina Paley, creator of the film Sita Sings the Blues. You can watch the film in its entirety on YouTube or various places around the web.

There’s footnotes below the jump to follow while you listen to the podcast.

0:58 - Wikipedia link for the Ramayana, (which I botch the pronunciation of.)

1:52 - Wikipedia link for Sita specifically.

3:07 - “Sita Sings the Blues” is anchored around Sita singing Annette Hanshaw songs.

4:12 - I’d seen EMI mentioned in posts about the film’s legal entanglements, but I’m not sure why I thought they were the main copyright holders. My mistake.

6:30 - Wikipedia has summaries of the various copyright extention acts.

8:54 - Paley has announced that “Sita Sings the Blues” is distributed for free under the Creative Commons license, and her work is not under copyright.

12:39 - The three narrators appear throughout the movie, attempting to hash out exactly what happened in the story. They first show up at part 2 of the Youtube sections.

13:36 - In an odd bit of synchronicity, the Indian figure of Hanuman is possibly the inspiration for the Chinese figure of Sun Wukong, The Monkey King, who was the focus of “American Born Chinese”, the subject of our last podcast.

15:49 - Roger Ebert’s review of “Sita” can be found here.

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