Streaming Availability: Rental
Yesterday we covered an extremely graphic, fabulously beautiful, experimental movie set in ancien regime France about the intersection of witch-hunting, feminism, and political corruption. I sure hope you liked that review, because today we doing exactly that. All those words again.
Belladonna of Sadness is a 1973 adult animation film made by Japanese studio Mushi Production. This was its third venture into surreal and semi-pornographic anime feature films. The first two being very strange Sci-Fi fantasy versions of A Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra, both directed by Osamu Tezuka, the legendary manga "godfather". I do not really know what led this studio down this path, those first two movies were not successful either financially or artistically. I guess if you want to see Astro-Boy style characters with tits out, track those two down. Neither of Tezuka's efforts succeeded, and he was not involved with Belladonna. That ended up being a much bolder movie, something entirely unique in the history of animation.
It also did not find an audience. Mushi would end up bankrupt and defunct not long after Belladonna's release.
The world does not lack for pornographic or near-pornographic anime these days. But whatever you're expecting, it probably is not this. Belladonna of Sadness's art style is nothing like Osamu Tezuka's, or really like any anime. The art style is somewhere between Moebius and Yoshitaka Amano and Gustav Klimt. I would love to hang Belladonna of Sadness frames, I could decorate my entire house with images from this movie. It really is that beautiful. There is wild geometry of the character silhouettes, very bold and strangely-shaped humans. Belladonna of Sadness has an amazing use of negative space, as in a lot of classic Japanese art. It is a very 'white' movie, with much of the canvas left unused when not needed. And the style and experimentation will only get bolder, Belladonna of Sadness has many sights to show you.
This is a cartoon whose goal is beauty above all else. The images are just intricate or delicate to actual "animate". The first five minutes have almost no movement at all, just pans across still paintings. Belladonna of Sadness is a drastic contrast to modern animation which has become so much more busy, with an emphasis on fluid motion. You know all those people obsessed with making everything 60 FPS? How about 0 FPS sometimes?
I'll admit, first time watching I wondered if this movie was perhaps unfinished. Maybe all this movie was going to be was a mere slide show of very beautiful concept art accompanied by late-60s folk pop music (lyrics sung by Mayumi Tachibana). All this would be incredible stuff to get as a tattoo, and I appreciate the boldness here, I've never seen anything like this. But I do crave, you know... motion in a motion picture.
Luckily, there is a lot more going on here. Eventually the filmmaking becomes more and more abstract and more full of motion. The human characters are the least mobile, but the more surreal and magical the events become, the more animation is added. Almost like a static dead world being given life. However, there is one character who is almost always in motion. Ladies and gentlemen, let's meet Satan (Tatsuya Nakadai), the great liberator of the peasant class!
Much like The Devils, Belladonna of Sadness is set in a world of extreme corruption and depravity. If Ken Russell had a dim view of power structures, Belladonna absolutely despises the medieval order. Usually only communist fiction has this much bile for a ruling class. The last frames are cheering on the French Revolution. In a small French village, Jeanne (Aiko Nagayama) and her husband, also named Jean (Katsutaka Ito) are two happy young newly-weds. But their joy is instantly shattered when Jeanne (♀) is gang-raped by the local skeletal baron and his twisted court. Jean (♂) later loses a hand for failing to pay taxes, and collapses into alcoholism. Jeanne (♀), having lost all hope, is seduced by a little fairy that changes everything. He has an... interesting form.
Satan in Belladonna of Sadness is phallic. In fact, he is a penis, this not subtle or a metaphor, he's a magical wish-granting wiener. At first he's a little pink dick-shaped fairy, which is a curiously low start for the Prince of Darkness. Later he'll grow into a towering beast with a distinctive mushroom-shaped head and pubes for chest hair. This is hysterically weird, there is no other possible reaction to this character other than to laugh at him. Jeanne herself is almost always naked, eventually copulating with the Devil, either sprite-sized or full-kaiju. And in exchange, she is granted power. First to become the village money-lender (stealing the job from a deplorable racist Jewish caricature), then later becoming a full on nudist witch running orgies.
Thing is, Satan is never evil in Belladonna of Sadness. Every power Jeanne gets makes her more liberated, more capable of controlling her sexuality. The Devil even grants her the magic to cure her village from the Bubonic Plague. Sure, she loses her immortal soul, but so what? This is a Faustian pact with no downside. And he's clearly a metaphor for sexual liberation (a feminist penis, wonders never cease) and revolutionary potential, all positive things. Why would you need a God when Satan can offer you all this? Jeanne does burn at the stake, but like Father Grandier yesterday, she dies for a freedom that cannot be trampled forever. And unlike Grandier, her dying spirit creates the French Revolution, which this movie sees as an absolute win.
Let's talk about the more animated and experimental parts of Belladonna of Sadness. It is extraordinary. There is a scene of Jeanne submitting to Satan which cuts to a yonic series of lines in the middle of a red frame, which is constantly morphing from a slit to breasts to Jeanne's entire body and back again. The plague scene is incredible and terrifying, the very town itself melts in a deluge of inky darkness. The most bizarre scene though is Jeanne giving away fully to "evil", where the movie fills itself with just random cartoon images. A jumble of all sorts of anachronistic pop art for minutes. It gets really weird. Whenever you think Belladonna has shown every trick it has, it comes up with new transitions and new powerful, strange images. By the time Jeanne is orchestrating orgies over her followers, the movie descends into rapid fire bestial chimeras, crazy stuff you'd only see in medieval marginalia.
I do not think Belladonna is a masterpiece. It is so full of nudity and sexual violence that I think the thirst overwhelms the message. This is a movie about a horny dick getting off on a woman's misery, quite literally. Even if that dick is doing good works, I can't ignore that. Still, the movie is incredible. I don't do drugs, but I imagine Belladonna is a great movie to watch while high. The world needs movies that are purely a formal experiment, even if they failed in their own time.
Next Time! Yeah, you probably have never heard of this one either, some obscure movie called The Exorcist.
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