ON A JAZZY RAMAYANA RE-DO

SEEING THE OLD THROUGH NEW EYES...

Every Indian born over the past few thousand years has likely grown up hearing wonderful, exciting, scary, mind-blowing and funny stories from the epics of Ramayana and the Mahabharata at his or her parent's lap or a grandparent's knee.  These epics make up a big part of what India's main religion Hinduism is all about. 

There have been a number of good books, movies and theatrical productions that introduce some of these stories to western audiences in recent years.  From Wikipedia's summary of the Ramayana:

The Ramayana (Sanskrit: vehicle of Rama) is part of the Hindu smriti, written by Valmiki (c.250 BC). This epic of 24,000 verses tells of a Raghuvamsa prince, Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is abducted by the rakshasa, or demon, Ravana. The Ramayana had an important influence on later Sanskrit poetry, primarily through its establishment of the Sloka meter. But, like its epic cousin, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana is not just a grand epic. It contains the teachings of the ancient Hindu sages and presents them through allegory in narrative and the interspersion of philosophic and devotional discourse. The characters of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Bharata, Hanuman and Ravana (the enemy of the story) are all fundamental to the grander cultural consciousness of India.

The Ramayana contains seven chapters, or kandas.

With the advent of the web and its plethora of cool technologies, it was only a matter of time before we started to see some of the stories re-told in this medium.  It's just surprising sometimes where these things come from.

Nina Paley, a creative alternative filmmaker, has created a cool, creative rendition of these stories using vintage jazz singer Annette Hanshaw's wonderful songs from the 1920s. 

From a creative perspective, the four chapters published so far are notable for the following reasons:

1. We only hear Sita's voice through this re-telling, "singing" in the voice of Annette Hanshaw.
2. All the other key characters are silent, with the narrative progressing through clever animation summarizing hundreds of pages into a few minutes of animation.
3. It does a good job of re-inventing visual icons that have historically remained relatively unchanged, into more accessible images for a contemporary audience.  For instance, you see the traditional Rama and Sita image below.  To see Nina's take on these and other key characters, click here.
4. The whole thing is a hoot to watch.

I don't know if it's the case in this instance, but using old jazz songs from the 1920s could also be opportunistic since it re-uses material with potentially expired copyrights, in a creative, new form.  Sepiamutiny has a good review of the animation.  Its content like this that makes one really excited about the future of video content on the web.

It's well-worth checking out at Nina Paley's website.  I particularly like Nina's use of the English alphabet represented in a font that looks like India's primary language, Hindi.

If you want to see a higher resolution set of the animation, I would recommend downloading the Bittorrent software first, and then downloading the 70MB file from the sepiamutiny site for all the four chapters.  The full treatment for the envisioned project, including description of the key characters can be found here.  Obviously these animations, even when all finished, only provide a pinhole into the characters, stories, and the magic of the Ramayana...but it's a great start to see the old anew.

Comments

[Nina Paley]

Thanks for the props! The whole feature will be done in, oh, two-and-a-half years or so...