“Review: Belladonna of Sadness”, 2016-06-17 (; backlinks):
Summary: Medieval peasants Jean and Jeanne are idyllic newlyweds. Their happiness vanishes, however, when Jeanne is raped by the local lord in a legally sanctioned deflowering ritual. Afterwards, while the couple tries to resume their life together, Jeanne starts receiving visions from a demon. It comforts her in her sadness, but it also encourages her to act out against the lord. Jeanne resists at first, but as her fortunes continue to wane, she’s thrown further into the demon’s embrace. As time goes on, Jeanne is drawn into an experience that radically reconfigures her sense of herself, the world, and the course of history itself.
Review: An X-rated anime classic newly remastered for the screen, Belladonna of Sadness is one of animation’s premiere psychedelic experiences, brought over to North America for nearly the first time ever in 2016. Its history has already been covered by us before, but here’s a quick refresher: Belladonna of Sadness is a legendarily low-budget, sexual, and psychedelic anime film from the 1970s. Poorly received at the time of its release, it accrued a cult audience over the next few decades. Recently, its reputation has been rehabilitated to the point where it’s considered an overlooked classic. Still, wider appreciation of the film was hampered by the lack of an English release and poor quality of existing prints. That changed in 2014, when the high-end distribution company Cinelicious chose it as their first candidate for an in-house 4k restoration and re-release. This May, the completed film began screening in theaters across the United States and Canada, and will continue to do so until September. I attended one of these screenings at International House theater in Philadelphia. This was my first time seeing the film, and I left very much impressed by both its artistry and storytelling.
…Fair warning, though—it’s not an exaggeration that this film is touted as ultra-sexual. I’d say most of the film’s runtime is made up of sex scenes, some of them violent and disturbing. It literally opens with a rape. These scenes are appropriate to the story, and the scenes are gorgeous in their artistry, but they are unpleasant. Otherwise, the sexual imagery is largely abstract. Flowers become vaginas, figures in cloaks become disembodied penises, and Jeanne’s rape is depicted as her being bisected from the groin upwards. Some psychedelic sequences also contain intense strobe lighting, so epileptics be warned. As for the visuals themselves, expect watercolors, morphing lineart, and little in terms of actual animation. There are no lush Kyoto Animation frame counts here. Much of the film’s motion consists of pans and zooms across static illustrations. There aren’t even any lip flaps. The studio went under while making this film, so this was a method of cutting costs. However, the results are memorable and even contribute to the film’s power. (There’s a great analysis to be written about its use of vertical versus horizontal space.) Despite these limitations, Belladonna of Sadness is, on a purely esthetic level, almost unbelievably beautiful. I’d hang any given frame of it up on my wall. Even if you don’t care about it’s message, this film is still worth watching as a work of altered-state eroticism.
Overall, viewers who can handle the content will probably be entertained by this gorgeous and trippy movie. However, I especially recommend Belladonna of Sadness to anyone interested in the history of anime.
…Belladonna of Sadness is the culmination of a rare attempt to make blatantly un-commercial, artistically challenging anime. At the cost of bankruptcy, Mushi Productions made a masterpiece that wouldn’t be fully appreciated for 40 years. Now hindsight allows us to see the breadth of its influence and depth of its daring. Get in on this experience while you have the chance.