Eiichi Yamamoto 5
Belladonna of Sadness
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 […]
Animerama
[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.
Sex, Satan & Psychedelia
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 […]
The Witching Hour
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 […]
Isao Tomita 1932-2016
Isao Tomita, who died on 5th May, was not just a composer, but also a performer and a pioneer in electronic music. Born in what is now Suginami ward in Tokyo, he spent much of his childhood in China, where his father Kiyoshi was a physician at the Kanebo textile mill in Qingdao. It was […]