Tag: Eiichi Yamamoto

September 25, 2021 · 0 comments

Eiichi Yamamoto, who died earlier this month, bore witness to crucial moments in anime history. As a young man, he was one of the talents behind the scenes at Ryuichi Yokoyama’s Otogi Pro studio, an experiment by a manga artist dabbling in the world of animation. But Yamamoto was the brains of the outfit, and […]

April 27, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Stolen from her betrothed, raped by the lord of the manor and his men, medieval European peasant girl Jeanne loses her faith in God and turns to the Devil. Cast out by the baron’s jealous wife, she embraces witchcraft and leads a peasant rebellion. That, at least, is the basic plot of […]

June 17, 2018 · 0 comments

[WARNING: Content potentially Not Safe For Work] By Jasper Sharp. The three titles in Mushi Pro’s short-lived “Animerama” series, A Thousand & One Nights (1969), Cleopatra (1970) and Belladonna of Sadness (1973), arrived at an interesting juncture in the history of Japanese animation and Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Production.

June 23, 2017 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. Belladonna of Sadness, the last film from Osamu Tezuka’s groundbreaking studio Mushi Pro, crashed and burned soon after the studio itself. It failed at the Japanese box office, and made little impression on the world outside Japan. French film journal Les Cahiers du Cinema recently hailed it as “the hidden treasure of […]

September 30, 2016 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. Who would have thought that one of the talking-point animated releases of the year would be an obscure title made in Japan over 40 years ago? Hailed as “One of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese animation”, Belladonna of Sadness (also known as Tragedy of Belladonna) was originally released in 1973 as […]