“It was, tellingly, too strange even for grindhouse distributors to take a crack at. “It was simply too hardcore for most animation audiences in the early 1970s,” Dennis Bartok, Executive Vice President, Acquisitions & Distribution for Cinelicious, writes in a new essay accompanying the film’s release. Yamamoto’s film bucked that trend - and ended up paying the price for it. At the time, film studios like Toei – whose best known protégé Hiyao Miyazaki would become one of the medium’s most celebrated directors – were well-known for its popular, yet largely anodyne offerings. Inspired by French historian-author Jules Michelet’s 1862 feminist witchcraft novel La Sorciere, Belladonna of Sadness remains that rare anime whose sense of transgression and shock value hasn’t diminished four decades after its release.
“I had two routes when thinking about how to compose music for the film: try to find a sound that expresses the truth of the characters’ internal struggles or express it through a pop aesthetic.
“The imagery of the film is very abstract, so I had to think abstractly,” Satoh says. Musician and composer Masahiko Satoh’s esoteric score only adds to the weirdness a dizzying blend of atonal avant-garde jazz, lush ballads, psychedelic rock and dirty, wah-wah-driven funk.
(Think Chris Marker’s La Jetée meets Fantastic Planet - or Yellow Submarine meets your worst acid freakout.) In one series of scenes, a man’s penis turns into a horse, a giraffe grows out of another man’s genitals, rabbits escape someone’s rectum, two tortoises 69 each other and several fish wriggle from a woman’s vagina. After war breaks out and most of the men (including the region’s regent) leave for battle, Jeanne makes a pact with Satan for supernatural powers and becomes a prominent, feared figure in the village the Joan of Arc-like avenging angel eventually leads a rebellion against the ruling class.īut any attempt to describe the boundary-pushing narrative pales in comparison to Belladonna’s form and imagery, as the film blends still pictures of watercolor paintings and illustrations with surreal, trippy visuals. Broken by the experience, the young woman begins conversing with an impish demon, who first appears as a playful penis. The plot, as such: When newlyweds Jeanne and Jean approach the lord of the manor for blessings on their marriage, the lord and his courtiers viciously assault the new bride. (It opens in Los Angeles on May 13th, and will be available on iTunes starting July 12th.)
Never before released in the United States, the film has been restored by Cinelicious Pics, ready to shock a new generation of cult movie fans and outré animation aficionados. They expected something that might distract their kids for 90 minutes, a sort of proto- My Neighbor Totoro instead, they were treated to an opening scene that climaxes with a brutal prima nocta gang rape, a devil disguised as an impish phallus worming his way between the heroine’s legs and, in between surreal orgy scenes, a meditative reflection on war, class structure and feminism.Ī lost masterpiece for more than 40 years, Eiichi Yamamoto’s singular, psychedelic film was largely neglected (or outright derided) upon its release, ruined the studio that produced it and, in subsequent years, became a discrete curio passed around in bootleg form among anime fanatics. Want to be the first to know what’s cool in Tokyo? Sign up to our newsletter for the latest updates from Tokyo and Japan.At the 1973 Berlin Film Festival, overenthusiastic parents, eager to take their kids to a “family-friendly” animated film, crowded into a German theater for a recently released Japanese anime film with an unusual title: Belladonna of Sadness. The best Harry Potter events happening in Tokyo right now
The male erotic art at Niigata’s Kokujoji Temple will be removed in May 2022 Naoshima is getting two new galleries including one by Tadao AndoĮxplore the fairytale village of Shirakawa-go on this winter illumination tour Gone but not forgotten: Tokyo landmarks that closed permanently this year More details will be announced at a later date via the store’s website. As you can see above, the exterior will be designed to harmonise with the adjoining Hareza Ikebukuro entertainment complex. The new complex will be an even larger, better place for visitors to experience the unique world of anime and manga. With its grand (re-)opening scheduled for spring 2023, the Animate flagship store will expand into the neighbouring site of the former Ikebukuro Health Care Centre. The nine-storey shop close to Ikebukuro Station’s east exit will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a massive renovation, aiming to become the world’s largest anime store. Animate’s flagship store in Ikebukuro is a popular place for anime and manga fans from around the world, who come to browse its large selection of comics, games and merchandise.