The Story of Animerama: Belladonna of Sadness
By 1971, things looked grim for both the Animerama project and Mushi Productions. Cleopatra had flopped, Tezuka had resigned from the studio in shame, and the studio's finances were more desperate than ever. It was during this time that Eiichi Yamamoto would create the final Animerama film: Belladonna of Sadness. After years of trying to realize Tezuka’s visions, it was finally time for him to demonstrate what he was capable of as a director. Belladonna would unite its unconventional source material, a handful of outside talent, and the limited resources of a dying studio to create a film unlike anything else in anime, before or since.
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This isn't the only reason, though. On the posters for the film, it is labelled not as “Animerama,” but instead “AnimeRomanesque”. The film’s original trailer also describes it as a “Romanesque” film. I'm not entirely sure what Nippon Herald meant by this phrase. Was it mean to be a mash-up of ‘anime’ and ‘bildungsroman’? Was it a reference to “Roman pornos,” a subset of pink films that were popular at the time? Ultimately, the reasoning doesn't matter because the rebranding didn’t stick. Belladonna of Sadness has retroactively been lumped in with the other Animerama films due to the focus on adult content and shared staff members. It's not unlike how Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind was originally made by Studio Topcraft but is widely considered an honorary Studio Ghibli film because of the involvement of Hayao Miyazaki and other future Ghibli staff members.
It's not hard to understand why Eiichi Yamamoto would want to rebrand the film. After all, it was in many ways a fresh start for him. For the first time in over a decade, he was not restricted to whatever ideas Tezuka wanted to adapt. He no longer had to work around Tezuka’s whims and demands. He was free to make whatever film he wanted in whatever fashion he wished. By this point, Yamamoto was more than ready to demonstrate what he was capable of as a director and what lessons he had learned from the previous two Animerama films.
He would take advantage of that freedom right from the start through his choice of source material. Instead of accepting whatever tale from world literature or history the producers picked, Yamamoto picked an obscure 19th century French history book: Jules Michelet’s La Sorciere. By modern standards Michelet’s book took a lot of liberties with actual history but it had an unusually progressive premise for its time. He posited that the medieval notion of witchcraft was in truth a form of rebellion by peasant women against the patriarchal forces of both the Church and the nobility that would otherwise oppress them. This rebellious premise was a good fit for both the turbulent political atmosphere of early 1970s Japanese media and the rising feminist movement within Japan. This premise would serve as the fertile soil from which Belladonna's story would grow.
It's an ambitious story to say the least, but Yamamoto had fewer resources than ever before to bring it tto the screen. Just a few years previous, he had been in charge of an entire sub-studio within Mushi Productions with dozen of animators at his command. By late 1971 that sub-studio was gone, along with most of its staff members. The few that were left were busy with TV work or more commissions from Rankin/Bass, even as their paychecks got increasingly inconsistent. Now he was stuck in a small, run-down side studio far removed from the main Mushi Production offices, working with a budget of 30 - 40 million yen. He only had half a dozen animators working on the film at any given time, including himself and his old friend Gisaburo Sugii doing double duty as a key animator and animation director. Luckily, Yamamoto had spent most of his career making the most of limited time and resources. He was prepared to take what talent he had on hand, mix it with the contributions of a few important outsiders, and make the tough but prudent decisions necessarily to achieve his vision of what an animated adult film could be.
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Belladonna of Sadness not only looks different than the
previous Animerama films, but from any other animated Japanese film before or since. Its unique look came from the film’s art director, Kuni Fukai. Fukai had dabbled in manga in his early
years, but had settled into a career as a professional artist with an abstract,
minimalist style. It was this particular
style that drew Yamamoto to Fukai’s art in the first place, as the use of
negative space and white backgrounds reminded him of classical Japanese art. Yamamoto commissioned twenty storyboard
images to serve as the basis for the film’s art style. These were mostly drawn in ink and
watercolor, drawing upon a rich tapestry of influences:
post-Impressionists like Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch, Art Nouveau artists
like Aubrey Beardsley, pop art, pieces from the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
and even traditional imagery from Tarot decks. Together they created a 5 minute pilot film which has sadly never been made public. It was a sort of proto-AMV, where Fukai's storyboards were edited together to the tune of Santana's Black Magic Woman with a narrator filling in the gaps for the story. Even at this early stage, they were crafting a look for Belladonna that was simultaneously not tied to any one particular time or place in history but very much rooted in the psychedelic style of the time in which it was made.
Fukai’s art was striking but it would have been a challenge for any Japanese animation studio to animate, much less with the extremely limited staff, funds, and time frame Yamamoto had available. His solution was to simply shift the focus away from animation altogether. From the start of production, he instructed his animators
to not worry about things like lip flaps for dialogue. After
all, there were traditional forms of Japanese puppetry like bunraku where the story was told through motion and expression instead of moving their mouths. Belladonna of Sadness would communicate its story in a similar fashion. Yamamoto encouraged his staff to explore alternate methods of animation and camera
movement to tell the story, reserving their best efforts for the scenes
that needed the most emotional and thoughtful impact and letting the audience mentally fill in the rest.
Thus, many scenes within Belladonna are collections of still images playing out over the dialogue, edited in such a way as to suggest moment. Other sequences are montages that unfurl horizontally across the screen in the manner of an illustrated scroll. That's not to say that there are no stand-out moments of animation to be found in the film. Jeanne’s transformation into a witch begins
with an explosion of Peter Max-esque psychedelica thanks to animator Takao Kodama, which is followed by Seiichi Hayashi's dreamy, constantly morphing sequence that was animated with oil paints on glass. The ravages of the Black Plague are lushly
animated in stark washes of black and white and flashing lights in a bravura sequence by Gisaburo Sugii.
It’s a testament to the skill of the crew and the beauty of Fukui's art that even when the film doesn’t
look cohesive, it feels cohesive. That being said, the staff were not oblivious to how unusual the film looked. Yamamoto himself would call it a "patchwork film." Animator Nobuyuki Tsugata would call its style "udokanai animation"- literally, "inanimate animation."
Something else that made Belladonna of Sadness different
from its predecessors was how it approached its sexual content. In A Thousand and One Nights, sexuality was
merely a spicy addition to a larger, more visually dynamic adventure.
In Cleopatra, sex appeal was front and center, a crutch upon which the
lackluster story could lean. While Belladonna
of Sadness featured more sex and casual nudity than either of its predecessors, it was backed up with a level of narrative maturity and nuance that
the other films lacked, along with a far stronger reliance on symbolism.
Yamamoto and his crew portray Jeanne's plight with some degree of sympathy and sensitivity. Her rape is not played for tawdry fanservice but instead as a chaotic jumble of of demons, bats, blood and tearing flesh. This imagery makes Jeanne's fear and trauma clear to the audience without crossing the line into outright exploitation, all while making it abstract enough to get it past the Japanese film censors. Her nudity in the film’s second half may deliver some degree of sex appeal but it also serves to symbolize her disconnect from civilization and her newfound connection to the natural world as a witch. Early on, Belladonna of Sadness frames sex as a traumatic and transactional act forced upon Jeanne by the men (and devils) around her, who value her and her body only as an object. As the film progresses the perspective changes, becoming at times something beautiful and tender and others as wild, transgressive, and literally transformative. The act of sex is transformed from an act of oppression to an act of liberation that helps Jeanne and those around her to reconnect with the world and find escape from their sorrows. A full-on analysis of Belladonna's symbolism could be an essay onto itself, one too dense and spoiler-filled for me to go into here. The ultimate point is that Belladonna of Sadness achieved what the other two Animerama films could not: telling a story that was not just mature in content, but also in theme and tone.
As production on Belladonna of Sadness continued, Yamamoto would make yet another fateful choice about its production. The de-emphasis on animation meant that most of the work was left to Kuni Fukui. While he did have a few assistants, it wasn't enough to keep up with all the large images the film needed for montages and panning shots. Meanwhile, the funds at Mushi Productions and Belladonna's modest budget were both starting to dry up. The only way Yamamoto could guarantee that his staff would get paid for their work was to complete Belladonna as soon as possible. This simply wasn't feasible, as only a quarter of the film was completed by the film's original production deadline of February of 1972.
In the past this would have meant another round of crunch time, but Yamamoto refused to endure that yet again. He knew first-hand how stressful crunch had been on himself and the others in the past. He had seen how it had affected the animators' morale and the quality of the previous two Animerama films. As far as he was concerned, he could get the same results from 10 artists working for 10 months as he once did from over 100 animators in one month and he was not willing to budge on the matter. The producers at Nippon Herald were willing to give Yamamoto's team an extension until the end of that summer, but he and his crew knew that would still not be enough time to get the film done.
The solution to this dilemma came from producer Makoto Motohashi. They could create a "dummy film," to deliver to Nippon Herald to secure payment for its completion. Afterwards, Eiichi Yamamoto could request to do retakes on the animation and thus buy himself the time and funding needed to complete the film. To achieve that, they assembled another half-dozen animators (including Osamu Dezaki, not long before his departure from the studio) to put together a rough draft of the film. It took that team all summer to complete it, and it turned out that the staff at Nippon Herald were perfectly fine with with the dummy film as-is. Yamamoto was forced to personally ask the producers at Nippon Herald for retakes and request yet another half-million yen to cover the costs, which was reluctantly granted. By the time the film was complete in November 1972, Belladonna's budget had doubled and the production was 10 months past its original deadline. Still, Yamamoto and his staff had managed to complete the film and create something truly avaunt guard in the process. None of them could have anticipated the struggle the film would face upon its release.
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The Animerama films might have been at an end, but things were far from over for their creators, though. In our final installment, we’ll look at the very different career paths that Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto took after the closure of Mushi Productions as well as the studio's own post-bankruptcy history. We’ll also examine how modern audiences came to rediscover the Animerama trilogy, and the legacy these films left upon the world of anime.
Part Four: Cleopatra
Part Six: Legacy
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Jonathan Clements. Anime: A History. BFI Palgrove. 2013.
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