The Story of Animerama: Cleopatra
A Thousand and One Nights didn’t come together quite as smoothly as Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto hoped, but they did manage to make a commercially successful film that captured some of the rebellious, experimental spirit of Mushi Production’s early days. That experience meant that things could only improve for their next Animerama feature. After all, they had an absolute slam dunk of a premise: the story of Cleopatra and her infamous affairs with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. With Tezuka at the helm and an experienced crew behind him, there was no way this could fail!
Yet Cleopatra would fail, due to factors both within and outside of Tezuka’s control. Its failure marked the beginning of the end
for both the Animerama project and Mushi Productions, and it would coincide with the lowest point in Tezuka’s animation career.
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Cleopatra had a lot working against it, right from the start. Nippon Herald only gave Mushi Pro a little over a year to produce the film. The production was so rushed that some of the voice actors recalled dubbing some late sequences in the film before the animation was even completed. The budget was smaller than that for A Thousand and One Nights, in no small part because Tezuka used part of it to cover the losses from that previous film. Yamamoto tried to maintain the production structure they had used before with A Thousand and One Nights, with teams of "main" animators working on specific characters while "guest" animators worked on particular sequences, albeit on a slightly smaller and far less indulgent scale than before.
They were able to bring back at least a few senior animators such as Kazuko Nakamura and Masami Hata, as well as previous guest animators such as Gisaburo Sugii and Hideo Furusawa. Tezuka also contributed a couple of sequences to the film as an animator, mercifully free of Horny Furry Nonsense. They were even able to bring in some new talent, such as indie animator Renzo Kinoshita (who worked on the prologue) and Mikiharu Akabori, an up-and-coming effects animator from Toei who had previously trained under Yasuo Otsuka. Still, the tight production deadline meant that there was less room for them to explore different visual styles and ideas, something that had made A Thousand and One Nights so unique in the first place.
Alas, those heavy hitters weren't enough to make up for the lack of available in-house animators. It also wasn't able to make up for Tezuka once again taking his sweet time with his storyboards. He began working on them shortly after production began in the fall of 1969 but would not complete them until April of 1970 - six months before Cleopatra's premiere. This time and money crunch meant that much of the animation was done by freelance animators from outside of the studio, animators who were paid a pittance per drawing. Eiichi Yamamoto was not comfortable with this idea, but this choice suited the producers at Nippon Herald just fine. As he would recount decades later, they saw it as a way of getting full-time work for part-time pay.
While the scale of Cleopatra’s production was more modest than its predecessor, it was a production full of compromises and shortcuts. Even decades later, it was a production that few of those involved liked to reflect upon. The eager spirit of collaboration and experimentation of the previous film was gone, snuffed out by months of crunch and the staff's ever-growing annoyance with its director. As for Tezuka, too much of his ego was caught up in making this film (and the Animerama project as a whole) successful in order to save both his career and studio. Combine this with his general distaste for critique and the rushed schedule and you get a film where most of the issues were on the screen instead of behind the scenes.
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Cleopatra was meant to be a cheeky take on the historical epics of the day, particularly the notorious 1963 film of the same name. It’s not the worst idea for a movie; if anything, it was a timely subject for parody and it would distinguish Mushi’s take on the story from the other Cleopatra films that had come previously. The problem is that when it comes to comedy, Cleopatra goes for quantity over quality. Jokes are thrown rapid-fire at the audience. It’s rare for more than a minute or two of its nearly two-hour run to pass without some sort of gag. Even the end credits are played for comedy. Yet there’s little consideration for the effect any of these joke may have on the tone of any scene. Are we meant to laugh or be horrified as Caesar’s invading forces harass comic characters as they slaughter and rape random Egyptians? Are we meant to cry for Marc Antony's death after watching him flail through a bunch of sight gags during the Battle of Actium? I’m not sure, and I’m not entirely sure if anyone other than Tezuka knew for certain.
A lot of Cleopatra’s humor depends on anachronisms and in-jokes. This style of humor was not unusual for Tezuka, but usually it was limited to a handful of sight gags shoved into the margins of his manga. Here they are omnipresent, referencing everything from high art to contemporary variety shows. Caesar’s welcome parade in Rome becomes an explosion of art history parodies. His assassination is staged like a kabuki play. Non-Tezuka manga characters randomly appear, be it Sazae-san cheering Cleopatra’s ascension to the throne, Osomatsu-kun’s Iyame getting harassed by centurions, or Gegege no Kitaro's Nezumi Otoko giving Marc Antony updates on a campaign. Some of these moments work as visual gags, but for most the randomness and audacity of these anachronisms and cameos seems to be the only punchline Tezuka could come up with for them.
Nowhere are the failings of this approach more evident than the framing story, where a trio of futuristic time-travelers go back to Cleopatra’s time in order to interpret an alien invasion scheme. The entire sequence is filmed in live-action with animated heads rotoscoped over the cast and the end result is bizarre and off-putting even when you know it's coming. So who is to blame for this idea? It depended on which director you asked. Yamamoto claimed up to 2015 that it was Tezuka's idea, and only late in life conceded that the concept was a leftover from A Thousand and One Nights, meant to serve as a (failed) test of a widescreen-friendly animation method. Meanwhile, Tezuka would claim a decade after its release that this approach was meant to be a riff on the infamously limited animation of Clutch Cargo.
It's hard to say which answer is correct, or if both responses contain some kernels of truth. It's an idea that certainly fits with Yamamoto's demonstrated fondness for juxtaposing different styles and animation methods. That being said, it's a creative choice that fits with Tezuka's particular sense of humor and brand of hubris. He was absolutely the sort of person who would never bother to ask if anyone else would get the reference, if such a reference made sense in context, or even why the film needed a sci-fi narrative wrapped around it in the first place.
The characters weren’t handled much better than the comedy. For proof, you only need to look at the title character herself. The real Cleopatra was a savvy, well-educated woman whose dalliances with powerful Roman men were part of her attempt to preserve her kingdom from Rome's voracious desire for its land and grain stores. It's not like this film strives for historical accuracy; right from the start it notes "this story is a fiction." I just wish she was written as something other than a passive victim of love. She’s neither a mastermind nor a vamp here, but instead a lonely, lovesick young woman who sincerely loves and mourns the men she's forced to target. It's a sympathetic take for sure, but one that treats her less like a ruler and more like a victim. If there is a villain to be found here, it's Apollodoria, Cleopatra’s nursemaid. She's all too willing to sexually covet and manipulate her former charge, even as she wields Cleopatra against the forces of Rome. She's easily the most complex and compelling character in the film.
The rest of the cast isn’t handled much better. Almost half of this nearly two hour film is dedicated to the passionate yet ill-fated romance between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, who is here portrayed with the swaggering machismo of a mob boss. In comparison, her romance with Marc Antony takes up less than a half-hour, and he is portrayed as a dopey, stuttering, insecure buffoon who is easily duped with the promise of sex. This imbalance not only flies in the face of actual history but also undermines what little pathos this film can generate for either man, making Cleopatra's grief for them all the more inexplicable.
Then there’s the time travelers: Mary, Jiro
and Harvey. Mary and Jiro are mostly relegated to the sidelines of the plot,
while Harvey finds himself stuck in a leopard to serve as Cleopatra’s own version of Horny Animal Nonsense. There's a lot of missed opportunity with their story in particular. As Saberspark notes in his own review, there's an obvious parallel between their own assault on this alien world and Rome's invasion of Egypt. Do they ever have their own "are we the baddies?" moment? No, because they can barely remember their future selves, much less the mission. They mostly serve to move the plot along and supply a few more anachronisms, and the whole thing is wrapped up with the cinematic equivalent of a shrug.
Underneath all the boobs and goofiness are some rather distasteful themes and trends. There’s definitely some colorism on display, as Cleopatra and her allies tend to be noticeably lighter skinned than the villains and their lackeys. There’s also a fair bit of homophobia on display here as while both Apollodoria and Caesar's nephew/future emperor Octavian are openly gay, their queerness is portrayed as something that is simultaneously sinister and comical. There’s also the obvious shift away from the artful eroticism of A Thousand and One Nights. While there are a few abstract sex scenes here, Cleopatra is far more interested in casually ogling the title character in the bath than it is in getting creative with it. Notably, this would become the only Animerama film to be censored by the Japanese film board, even if it was just for a single shot of Cleopatra's bare butt.
It's clear that Tezuka's idea of toning down the sexuality in the later Animerama films had long since fallen by the wayside. Now it was the crutch that the film’s trailer leaned upon as it declared how the film was “Super Erotic! For Adults Only! Frequent and intense!” The same trailer also states that it’s “better than 1001 Nights” and full of “great ideas, perfectly executed.” It suggests that Nippon Herald themselves knew the film was flawed and hoped they could convince themselves and the public otherwise with enough exuberant advertising. Alas, no amount of bluster and hype could fix this flawed film or the public's response to it.
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This debt couldn't have come at a worse time for the studio. After a decade of steady rising, the Japanese economy was beginning to stagnate. One of the many effects of this was a general decrease in box office receipts across Japan. At the same time, the animation boom that Mushi had helped bring about was swiftly crashing. Their early success with Tetsuwan Atom led to the creation of numerous new anime studios, each trying to match Mushi's breakneck pace and penny-pinching ways to create more content. At the same time, many of the larger studios were facing labor struggles from overworked staff. The economic downturn led to less demand for anime all around, which meant layoffs for the larger studios and shutdowns for the smaller ones. Tezuka and the rest of the management at Mushi Productions tried to hold things together, but at this point no amount of debt shuffling could hide how swiftly the studio was falling into decline.
Things didn’t go much better for Cleopatra's American release. Nippon Herald more or less washed their hands of it after its failure, so it was up to Tezuka himself to broker deal two years later with a no-name American distributor called Xanadu Productions. They leaned even harder on the film’s sex appeal, using the "Queen of Sex" subtitle that had seemingly been coined for international release by Nippon Herald.” They promoted it as the first X-rated cartoon in publications like Playboy, despite never submitting the film for an official rating. It would receive an extremely limited, sub-only run on April 24, 1972, and reportedly the few people who saw it hated it so much that some demanded refunds.
Critics of the day were equally unimpressed. The New York Times praised its backgrounds and imagery but scorned its reliance on "a bevy of cuties that trot around bare-breasted." Variety likened it to “low-budget Italo spectacle, with emphasis on vulgar low comedy [and] tattle scenes flashily edited for maximum impact of blood and gore.” To add insult to injury, Cleopatra came out in the United States only two weeks after the premiere of Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat. That film was everything Cleopatra was not. It was steeped in American counterculture, it had the graphic smut audiences wanted, and it wore its legitimate X rating with pride. That film would go on to become a landmark in adult animation while Cleopatra fell into obscurity, taking Xanadu Productions down with it.
Tezuka had bet everything on the continued success of the Animerama films, and the failure of Cleopatra hit him hard. The film's tie-in manga adaptation was a failure, yet another victim of Tezuka's struggling manga career. The studio's publishing branch was in freefall, and an attempt at money-saving layoffs in the spring of 1971 only served to push the staff to unionize. Meanwhile, the animation studio tried to bring on new staff to work on the shows that were still in production, but it wasn't enough to stem the discontent among the older animators. Many of them left Mushi Productions to work for other studios or founded new ones such as Madhouse and Sunrise.
It all came to a head in the summer of 1971. That June, Tezuka was presented with a proposal to once again restructure Mushi Productions. This shift would redistribute even more creative power away from Tezuka, shifting the company's focus away from Tezuka's body of works and towards more commercial properties for other companies and creators. At the same time, Kazuko Nakamura presented Tezuka with her letter of resignation. Tezuka joked that he would quit alongside her, but it would take him a few more weeks to officially step down as head of the studio. In the months before his departure, Nippon Herald gave the green light for Mushi Productions to produce one more Animerama film. It was intended to be just another contractual obligation, but the end result would become both Eiichi Yamamoto's masterpiece and Mushi Production's swan song: Belladonna of Sadness.
Part Three: A Thousand And One Nights
Part Five: Belladonna of Sadness
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Jonathan Clements. Anime: A History. BFI Palgrove. 2013.
"Cleopatra (1970 film)." Wikipedia.
Gan Sheuo Hui. "Prefiguring the Future: Tezuka Osamu's Adult Animation and Its Influence on Later Animation In Japan." Asia Culture Forum 2006; Session 3: Auteurs and Their Legacy. Kyoto University. Academia.edu
Natsu Onoda Power. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and The Creation of Post-World War II Manga. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson. 2009.
Jasper Sharp. "Animerama." 2019. All the Anime
Toadette. "Rintaro, 'New Moomin' (1972), and the Last Days of Mushi Pro." 3/23/23. On The Ones.
Matteo Watsky. "The History of Mushi Pro - 05 - Farewell to Tezuka (1970 - 1972)." 7/29/2023. Animétudes.
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