Belladonna of Sadness

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Anime movie
title Belladonna of Sadness
Original title 哀 し み の ベ ラ ド ン ナ
transcription Kanashimi no Beradonna
Country of production JapanJapan Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1973
Studio Mushi Production
length 86 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Eiichi Yamamoto
idea Jules Michelet
script Yoshiyuki Fukuda
music Masahiko Satō
synchronization

Belladonna of Sadness ( Japanese 哀 し み の ベ ラ ド ン ナ , Kanashimi no Beradonna ) is a Japanese anime film directed by Eiichi Yamamoto . It was loosely based on the treatise La Sorcière (1862) by Jules Michelet and is the third and final part of the Animerama trilogy ( Sen'ya Ichiya Monogatari and Cleopatra ) by the Mushi Production studio , which consisted of erotic animated films for adults, conceived by Osamu Tezuka . The story, set in the European Middle Ages, tells of the beautiful peasant girl Jeanne, who is subjected to sexual violence and accused of witchcraft.

history

The newly wed peasant couple Jeanne and Jean would like to pay the local baron the traditional bridal tax; but the baron asks for more than they have. Then the baroness determines that Jeanne's virginity is the bride's tax, whereupon the nobles present repeatedly rape her while they expel Jean from the castle. Reunited, Jean tries to comfort her. You should forget the past. Jeanne meets in visions a devil reminiscent of a phallus, who tells her that she wants and can have power and revenge. She makes fun of his small size; but he says he can be as big and powerful as she wants, and Jeanne stimulates him. She begins to work as a weaver and is successful with it, so that the other farmers soon believe that she is in league with the devil. As Jean soon pays most of the taxes in the village due to her success, he is appointed tax collector. But when he didn't bring the baron enough money for his war preparations, he cut off his hand - to encourage him. Soon the baron will go to war. Jeanne manages to get a cheap loan from a usurer in return for unnamed consideration and can establish herself as a kind of counter-baroness, since she can now lend money.

When the baron returns from the war victorious, the baroness incites him to take action against Jeanne, whom she describes as a witch. She is driven away from the agitated crowd; Jean, who has since become an alcoholic, no longer lets them into their apartment. She flees to a nearby forest, where she now makes a deal with the heavily grown Phallus Devil. Meanwhile, the black death attacks the village. But with her knowledge of certain plants Jeanne can help the people who come to her. She also helps a page to arouse the baroness's lust; the baron surprises page and baroness and murders them. Now he lets Jean come to him; he should ask Jeanne to his court to use her knowledge for the benefit of the people. Jean agrees. Jeanne, happy to be reunited with Jean, comes with him. But she rejects all of the baron's offers. He then has them burned at the stake. When Jean wants to rebel, he too is killed.

synchronization

Production and publication

The film uses only a few actual animation elements, but is mainly based on drawings that are scanned by the camera, whereby references to Western art, especially the works of Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt and tarot illustrations, are striking; there are also numerous borrowings from pop art and films such as Yellow Submarine .

However, the budget available for production was significantly lower than necessary. Eiichi Yamamoto himself described the film as a "patchwork".

In 2004 the film was reissued on DVD in Japan. In 2016 it was extensively restored in 4K format and reissued by the American company Cinelicious Pics, which showed it in selected cinemas from May 6, 2016 and released it on Blu-ray on July 12, 2016 . Rapid Eye Movies plans to release this version on November 25, 2016 with German subtitles.

reception

Belladonna of Sadness received positive reviews at the time of its premiere and was shown in competition at the 1973 Berlinale under the title Tragedy of Belladonna , but was commercially unsuccessful. In retrospect, it is seen less positively by Japanese critics: Tsugata Nobuyuki calls it "non-animated animation" and Sugii Gisaburō makes the last, failed attempt to realize Tezuka's claim to artistic cinema.

Due to the combination of social criticism, feminism and explicit depictions of sexual violence paired with lust, which sometimes weighs between hippy porncore and voyeurism, reviewers of the restored version did not always find it easy or appropriate to take a clear stance on the work. The Taz wrote : "The images that Yamamoto and Fukai found of violence against women in patriarchal, sexist structured societies are still disturbing today, the feminist end of the film initially seems irritating". Alissa Wilkinson wrote on the American Roger Ebert website that the film was "still a tough watch, partly because it seems so bent on shocking every viewer that each gorgeous image is followed by something terrifying (or sometimes, juvenile - never has the devil been less scary than in the form of a penis with a face). " Der Spiegel considered the work to be a “typical mixture of emancipation and sexploitation” whose “mixture of psychedelics and art history still surpasses the majority of today's animated films in terms of visual art.” The Internet platform Gelore wrote about the new presentation: “The renewed encounter with Belladonna is, as usual, disturbing , the soundtrack of Japanese rock pioneer Masahiko Sato still sounds like a psychedelic brain operation, and the message of the film remains largely in the fog ”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ IMDb page of the film
  2. ↑ a b Jonathan Clements : Anime - A History . Palgrave Macmillan 2013. p. 128. ISBN 978-1-84457-390-5 .
  3. ↑ Belladonna of Sadness. In: Cinelicious Pics. Retrieved October 9, 2016 .
  4. ↑ http://www.taz.de/!5332712/
  5. ↑ http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/belladonna-of-sadness-2016%7CDeutsch : "The film is still disturbing, especially since it really wants to shock its viewers that every fantastic picture is followed by something terrifying ( or, sometimes, something childish too - there has never been a less creepy devil than this penis with a face) ".
  6. ↑ Jörg Schöning: Erotic Anime "Belladonna of Sadness": Freedom, Equality, Nudity. In: Spiegel Online . September 1, 2016, accessed June 10, 2018 .
  7. ↑ https://galore.de/kultur/artikel/belladonna-of-sadness