Betty Boop does the Ramayana

This appears to be proof that Homo sapiens has finally evolved what is modestly referred to in the ethological press as "some form of autonoetic consciousness," speaking of dumb monkeys.

Sita came out in 2008, and finally cleared some peculiarly short-sighted copyright hurdles (the 1920's songs by Annette Hanshaw, who died in 1985) this February.

On Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), once you've downloaded your MP4 (or OGM, whatever), you have to use DeVeDe to create DVD structures and put them into an iso file, which you then burn to DVD the usual way. If DeVeDe isn't already installed, get it from System → Administration → Synaptic Package Manager. It takes about 2 hours, more or less, to turn the Sita download into a standard Video DVD. Much longer, of course, to download — the file is measured in Gigabytes. I'd suggest Azureus to get one of the torrents.

Yeah, it's a chick flick. Roger Ebert raves about it. New York film maker breaks up with her boyfriend and immolates herself in a post-feminist deconstruction of the Ramayana rendered entirely in Flash. Gorgeous animation, creative fire and startling imagination save several levels of more than one old, familiar story. And yes, the comparison with Betty Boop is apropros, even downright allusive — Paley's stagey tirade ends just like Betty's films, with a vaudevillian boop-oop-a-doop. As dragonfly drawings go (you know who you are ;-), this one is not bad at all.