Nina Paley’s critically-aclaimed feature Sita Sings the Blues (100% on RottenTomatoes.com) will be screened at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco on July 20th to benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In related news, the EFF is celebrating their 20th anniversary, and Paley was called upon to get the party started. She animated this short below that illustrates one of the issues the EFF fights for.

Sure! If you’ve got the skills and the time, a Sita Sings the Blues video game is yours for the making. Or a sequel or whatever else you can dream up. That’s because Nina Paley, the writer and director of the award-winning, feature-length animated film, has pushed the FLA source files into the in your hands with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This move follows suit with Paley’s distribution method in which she offered a free download earlier this year, hoping it will promote the sales of the limited edition DVD and accompanying merch.

Nina Paley’s Flash-animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues is being prepared for its TV debut. The film, which took the Best Feature award at the 32nd Annecy Animated Film Festival, will air on WNET Channel 13 on March 7th, 2009 at 10:45 pm (ET). The 82-minute feature is also being readied for free online distribution. In related news, Paley was featured yesterday in a Matthew Ross article in Variety on award nominees.

Watch the trailer for Sita below:

Three cheers for Nina Paley and her Flash-animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, which took home the top feature prize at the 32nd Annecy International Animated Film Festival. As you may have spotted at CartoonBrew.com, Paley received an Annecy Cristal trophy after the jury, which included Matt Groening, voted in her favor. Bravo, Nina!

The gargantuan effort and time Nina Paley spent to get her independent film, Sita Sings the Blues, to the silver screen appears to have been well spent. This 82-minute, Flash-animated feature has already wowed audiences at the Berlin International Film Festival, but her recent screening at the Tribeca Film Festival (where she caught “Tribeculosis” – ha!) has revealed a torrent of glowing reviews. This morning, Variety’s Ronnie Scheib said that her film “constitutes an irrefutable argument for classic 2-D animation as a viable, vibrant low-budget arthouse medium for adults.” How ’bout them apples?

Along the way, Paley paused to join Bill Plympton, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore in an animation discussion with IFC:

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the trailer for Sita Sings the Blues, dubbed “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told”: