Kumarasambhava: Asceticism Bears Fruit

For my senior thesis (I’m an Asian Studies major) I decided to combine a few of my interests, and created an animation in addition to the traditional paper component. This is meant to be inspired by Indonesian wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) styles, and the story is "The Birth of Kumara", an epic poem from 4th century India by Kalidasa. I had a lot of trouble conveying the story clearly with the four silent puppets, so a brief summary of the moment I'm dealing with here (a single chapter from the poem which deals with the Hindu gods), is that Shiva as an ascetic has just denied love, and leaves Parvati behind, who is distraught, thinking they will now never be together. She composes herself, and decides to search out a place to be an ascetic herself with the hopes her devotion will somehow reach Shiva. She climbs a mountain, and becomes one (the epic poem talks about how she is so extreme in her practices that she only drinks rainwater and moonlight and subsists on fallen tree leaves). Eventually a man, another ascetic, comes to talk to her. He asks her why she's treating herself so, considering how beautiful and noble she clearly is. She says it's for love of Shiva, and the ascetic acts surprised, going on at length about how horribly mismatched they would be and what a generally good-for-nothing fellow Shiva is. Parvati gets angry at this and after defending Shiva and her love for him, asks the ascetic to either leave, or she will. When she stands to go and is walking away, the ascetic reveals himself as Shiva and reaches out to stop her; deeply moved by her love for him and devotion to asceticism, he has now decided to be with her. I created the animation using the stop motion software iStopMotion + camera I mounted over a light box, and the puppets I made myself. The music is copyright Nelly Furtado, and for fun, here are the lyrics (which I think suit the story pretty well with the themes of love/loss/longing!): In the day, in the night Say ...

Channel: Vimeo Video Length: 3m 45s Date Found: Fri, Jul 09 2010 1:48 AM Category: Home Video Date Produced: Tue, Apr 20 2010 10:48 PM View Count: 0