Total Pageviews

Saturday, February 28, 2009

SITA SINGS THE BLUES can now be seen online

Animator NINA PALEY is one of a small group of people (of whom Bill Plympton is best known) who have created a full length, sound, feature animated film singlehanded. Nina did literally everything on this project except write and record the music, which is provided by Twenties singing star Annette Hanshaw.
SITA SINGS THE BLUES was held up from release by copyright issues that have now been resolved.
The entire feature can be viewed here.
Congratulations, Nina!

7 comments:

Brett W. McCoy said...

Yay! At long last!

Michael Sporn said...

Actually, I can think of a number of people who have done features singlehandedly. In 1968 Jan Lenica did ADAM 12 by himself. This is the first one I know about.

Bill Plympton has always had great help from people such as Biljana Labovic or Signe Bauman. He's often animated alone but many others color and do bgs. If he qualifies to be doing it singlehandedly then so did Lotte Reiniger, who only had two assistants on PRINCE ACHMED in 1926. One operated the camera, the other did cutouts.

Nina Paley did it all herself - including the editing.

Nancy said...

Hello Michael,

Well, if we count that fellow in Argentina in 1910, that makes another. But the film hasn't survived.
Plympton now has help from others doing the rending, and so on. Not in his early films. But I won't argue with you, Mike. You and Mark know more about this history 'who did what' stuff than I ever will. It's just nice to hear that Nina can finally show her movie without having some huge corporation suing her.

Brett W. McCoy said...

Wasn't Phil Nibbelink's "Sealed with a Kiss" essentially done by a single person also?

David said...

Great news that the film can finally be seen in it's entirety.

I still hope Nina can get the music clearance rights negotiated down to a reasonable fee so that the film can receive some sort of theatrical showing or at least be released on DVD.

What an accomplishment !

----

P.S.

While we're on the subject I believe that Phil Nibbelink's 2006 feature film "Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss" was animated single-handedly by Phil , sans assistants (he also painted the BG's , did the editing ,etc. ) I've never seen the finished product , but I was fascinated to read that Phil had animated an entire feature on his own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=10189121

Nancy said...

Yes, Nibbelink did a feature film on his own but he definitely wasn't the SECOND person to animate a feature singlehanded. (I can agree to disagree with Mike Sporn; I have never heard of the feature he refers to.)

Floyd Norman said...

I might be wrong on this, but didn't Fred Wolf animate "The Point" for a TV special? I thought it was a feature length show.

Anyway, it featured music by Nilssen, and I think it was a solo effort by Fred