The Friday Fillip

I’m a fan of myths… those big and little stories that persist in various forms within a culture, and often across cultures. Some folks treat “myth” as a dirty word, opposing it to truth or reality, and there’s no doubt that in the grip of a powerful myth we can, individually or collectively, go to places we ought not. But good or bad, myths drive us much of the time, in my view, and so we’d be best off knowing them as well as we can, retelling them consciously, and generally mixing them up to suit our own purposes.

Today the fillip offers you two myths: one little, one big; one familiar, one less so — and both mashed up thanks to technology with other elements in order to delight.

Let’s start small, with the myth as fairy tale, that sort of myth-disguised-as-inconsequential-bedtime-story you pass on to your children and they to theirs. Little Red Riding Hood is the story, and animation is the medium (as it is with the bigger myth yet to come). As my aim today is to delight, I won’t bother with any analysis or history of this story, but if you’re interested, Wikipedia does a decent job of it. For a school project Tomas Nilssen re-interpreted this fairy tale to show it, wordlessly, as it might be done with contemporary “info graphics,” and set against the background music of Slagsmålsklubben, a Swedish electro-pop group, and all done neatly in under three minutes.

Bigger by many orders of magnitude is the Ramayana, the Hindu epic that tells the story of the king, Rama, and his struggles to be an ethical ruler, one part of which is about Rama’s rescue of the beautiful Sita from the clutches of Ravana, the demon king of Lanka (Sri Lanka). American animator, Nina Paley, wove this last part together with her own story of the way in which her husband went to India and then dumped her from there by email. But what a weave! Paley mixes elements from everywhere to tell this myth, most notably, perhaps, using the recordings from the late twenties of jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, the result being a feature length film, Sita Sings the Blues.

For those who prefer their pleasure mixed with a little law, let me tell you that there’s a big copyright controversy surrounding this film, having to do with the fact that certain copyrights in the Hanshaw songs still exist, though most do not, and the holders exacted stringent terms from Paley, all of which you can read about here and here.

For the rest of us, let me first point you to an excerpt, the Battle of Lanka, which will serve within three minutes or so to capture you for the whole film. The entirety of the movie is available in various places, most handily perhaps on the Internet Archive, where you can stream it or download it (entirely legally) in various formats and degrees of compression. But if, like so many of us nowadays, you prefer bites instead of a whole meal, you can find more excerpted parts on YouTube.

And, as you’ll hear Annette Hanshaw say, if you pay attention: “That’s all.”