Sita Sings the Blues

I was extremely excited to be watching a film for today's class but I was even more excited from my unexpected interest in the film itself. After watching Sita Sings the Blues, I was satisfied with the way it simply portrayed the story of Ramayana and how it incorporated humor and a modern part of the story to make it easier to watch and understand.

Sita Sings the Blues is basically about a king who had three wives and four sons who was trying to crown one of his sons Rama as his heir when one of his other wives asked him to send Rama out in to the woods so that Rama wouldn't become king. When Rama was sent out, Sita, his wife, followed him also. However, in the dangerous woods, the demon king Ravana was planning on kidnapping Sita to make her his own wife. He succeeds by distracting Rama with a gold deer but even when she is kidnapped Sita is determined to keep her loyalty to Rama and continues to worship him and shows him unconditional love. Through a half monkey half man, Rama rescues his wife but doubts her purity twice and eventually abandons Sita to the forest even though she is pregnant. When Sita gives birth two their two sons, Rama hears their praises to him and goes back to the forests to search for them but doubts Sita's devotion to him again. Sita then asks the heavens to take her back if she was devoted and pure for Rama the whole time, and then is taken by the earth as Rama regrets.

I really liked that the story was made more appealing by using animations, songs, and humor. I felt that the storytellers in black were the humorous aspects of the film. I first thought the narrators being confused themselves was part of the humor, but the more I thought about it I think it was more about the natural confusion that we talked about in class. Even they were confused with all the difficult names and some of the parts of the story that simply didn't make sense. For example, there was a scene in the movie when the narrators were stating that Sita not going back with the monkey man back to Rama rather than sacrifice hundreds of lives made no sense. I honestly thought that the quote from the movie that appealed to me the most was when the narrators were arguing on the reason for one of the aspects of the movie and one of them simply said "Don't challenge these stories." I feel like when reading religious texts sometimes you need to accept them the way they are rather than keep asking why and asking for a valid reason for it. Sometimes things are the way they are because they are the way they are.