Ars mechanica
The visual style of Nina’s Sita Sings the Blues is hypnotic in part because of the metronomic regularity of its lines, from the sinusoidal waves 
to the microchip rain 
. It reminds me of wide-eyed manga faces, Web comics like Demian 5
and the fractal patterns in Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave at Kanagawa.’
But the analogy is deceptive. Japanese artists strove for harmony and regularity in a time and form when painting them was hard. Nina uses Flash, so what was difficult (symmetry) becomes easy, and what was easy (organic texture) 
now requires hand-drawing on a tablet 
.
Drawing it on a PC is also what makes Sita’s colors pop. Decade-old FutureWave code made color gradients trivial. The medium influences the style.
But it’s still merely a series of nudges. Nina came up with interesting geometries like Ravana’s interlinking boomerang beards, and borrowed cinematic techniques like the arrowcam from Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood. The artist-animator still had to puzzle through the visual sense of the phillum.
on Thursday, November 29th, 2007, 2:33 pm in Animation, Art, Film, Tech › 
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Manish, you zany art critic you. You should see the whole film first! I appreciate the flattery and positive attention, and I’m grateful, really I am. But I want the nutcase fundamentalists and kill-whitey post-colonial theoreticians to hold their critique until they’ve seen the whole feature, so in principle I should ask the same of others.
There are several additional visual styles in “Sita” the web site barely hints at. We gots fake Mughal miniatures (hand-painted by me, using real watercolors and parchment), fake shadow puppets, collages from vintage devotional cards, wiggly expressionistic freehand animation, and more.
That is a good summation of making art digitally. There are some good paint programs that simulate organic texture, but I went old skool with the paint and parchment. Painting, it turns out, is kinda hard. But it makes making mistakes easy. It’s a lot harder to make mistakes when you have the absolute control afforded by software like Flash.
I hope you’ll still be willing to write a review after you see the whole thing.
i am enjoying your newfound prolixity ub. Very interesting perspective.
Thanks, Nina, very interesting. This wasn’t a review– I’ll try and make it to the SF screening.