Over three millennia, the epic canto The Ramayana has provided an archetype for many cultures–Hindu, Thai, Lao, Malaysian–of the ideal man of virtue. In Paley’s film, the story is narrated humorously by three individuals in conversation with each other; their commentary provides different versions of the story (of which there are many), and as they debate the details the animation follows suit. What it boils down to is this:

Rama, the eldest son of an emperor (and supposed reincarnation of Vishnu), is forced to step aside and allow his younger half-brother to take the throne because of a favor the emperor owes to the younger son’s mother. Rama takes the news well and accepts his 14-year banishment to the forest, taking his young wife, Sita, along with him at her own insistence. Rama and Sita, the mythological “perfect couple,” live happily in isolation until the evil king of Sri Lanka, Ravana, stealthily captures Sita, leading to an 18-month war between the two men and their armies. Rama eventually wins Sita back, then turns her away because her living in another man’s home has made her impure. He will not allow Sita in the palace when he returns to the throne after his 14-year hiatus, and she responds by willingly moving back to the forest alone to raise Rama’s two sons-–all the while remaining devoted to Rama.

Upon first coming across the story while she was living with her then-husband in India, Paley writes on her website that she “considered the Ramayana little more than misogynist propaganda.” A few months later, while on a work trip to New York where she was dumped over email (all of which is related in the film), Paley says she saw something in the Ramayana that was universal. She developed one scene from the fable into an animated short, but the creative urge was not spent and early viewers of the piece wanted more. Sita Sings the Blues was fashioned in its full length over the next couple of years, and is currently screening in numerous North American cities.

As if that wasn’t enough, there is even more drama behind Paley’s Sita: following the first well-received screenings, the indie cartoonist happened upon another self-defining moment in her career – copyright infringement. At present, her film cannot be distributed in theaters unless Paley pays several hundred thousand dollars for the rights to use Annette Hanshaw’s music; also she may be getting sued. As a result, Paley is now championing a new cause, and she’s not being quiet about it. Read her blog or see if you can catch her at one of the film’s screenings this year. Her legal battle could be a watershed for independent filmmakers everywhere.

Melikyan, born in Azerbaijan and raised in Armenia, studied film in Moscow where she met Masha Shalayeva, an enchanting actress for whom she wrote the role of Alisa. The young girl’s interactions with the city of Moscow depict a sense of wonderment that must certainly be a close reality to how Melikyan would have felt upon first exposure to Russia’s capital.

Alisa’s comically ordinary story begins with her underwater conception — the first scene of the film. Her mother, whose character comes to define the picture of small-town frustration, has a chance encounter with a sailor when she is out by herself for a swim at a quiet beach on the Black Sea. The sailor never reappears in their lives, but Alisa’s mother continues to engage passing seamen in rendezvous to ease her boredom and single-mother stress. When Alisa’s curiosity leads her to walk in on one of these meetings at a young age, she reacts destructively, setting fire to their seaside shanty and refusing to speak for the duration of her childhood.

Throughout the grey and provincial scenes of the first half of the film, Alisa’s imaginative narration lends color and humor. She also develops a secret power — if she wishes for something to occur, it will indeed come to pass. A few months before her seventeenth birthday Alisa’s mental efforts cause a massive windstorm in her seaside town, destroying their home yet again and leading her mother to move her and her grandmother to Moscow. Alisa’s frank voice describes the event with innocent astuteness, explaining, “When people have nowhere else to go, they go to Moscow.”

The three women take up residence in a typical Moscow high-rise, and Alisa and her mother join the workforce — her mother working as a smartly-uniformed grocery store clerk, and Alisa handing out flyers around town dressed as a giant cell phone. The young girl’s tender childhood is humorously shattered by the appearance of “Sasha” (Yevgeni Tysganov), a depressed but attractive yuppie who makes his living selling real estate on the moon; he and Alisa meet when they both jump off a bridge on the same night.

The film succeeds in Melikyan’s use of Alisa’s humorously innocent narration, fantastical symbolism, and several visually-stylized dream sequences. It calls to mind Amelie and The Science of Sleep, though it doesn’t quite achieve the complexity of either of these films. What Rusakla lacks in density, however, it makes up for with pure charm. You’ll feel an instinctive pull toward Melikyan’s Moscow, and an honest desire to understand its people and its art. The film breaks through whatever “curtain” the city’s true heart has been hiding behind, as Moscow comes of age on screen, symbolically abandoning it’s tail alongside the story’s young narrator.