The Story of Animerama: Legacy
The Animerama trilogy officially ended in 1973 with the failed release of Belladonna of Sadness and the closure of Mushi Productions. That was far from the end for Osamu Tezuka and Eichi Yamamoto, the men who had helped bring that troubled trilogy into the world. While both found success in their post-Mushi careers, that success took them down very different paths. It wasn't even the end for Mushi Productions itself. Meanwhile, the Animerama films themselves would linger in obscurity for decades, waiting for a time when the world would be more receptive to what they had to offer.
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In 1973, Osamu Tezuka’s career seemed to be just as much of a wreck as his former studio. His manga career was still faltering, although not for lack of effort on his part. He continued to churn out dark, strange, experimental works in the vain hope of creating his own gekika manga. These included titles such as Barbara, Bomba, Ode to Kirihito, The Book of Human Insects, Ayako, Apollo’s Song, and Alabaster, just to name a few. Yet all of theme struggled to find an audience, as Japanese manga readers continued to be turned off by their favorite childhood mangaka insisting on writing all of these weird manga about sex, violence, and corruption.
His animation career wasn’t going much better. Tezuka felt the need to reassert himself as a director after the failure of Cleopatra, even if that meant making animation for TV again. He would make a fresh start with a new company: the aptly titled Tezuka Productions. He had founded it back in 1968 to deal with some of the rights to his manga, but it had slowly but surely transformed into an animation studio that would frequently subcontract itself to Mushi Productions. In 1971 he decided to focus all his efforts on this studio, even taking some senior Mushi animators with him. His first new project there would be Marvelous Melmo, an adaptation of his then-ongoing manga of the same name. It was a curious mixture of magical girl storytelling with elements of health and sex education, using Melmo's ability to magically change her age to educate the audience on child development, puberty, and more. It was an eccentric show that fared poorly in its ratings and its discussion of sex education reportedly angered parents' groups. Tezuka had once again produced a flop.
It is no exaggeration to say that Black Jack saved Osamu Tezuka’s career. It was a huge success, running for eight years with over 200 chapters to its name. It would spawn numerous animated adaptations and spin-offs over the years, and Black Jack himself became one of Tezuka’s most iconic characters. Its success not only helped to secure Tezuka's fortunes once more but also finally brought an end to his long creative slump. For the better part of a decade, Tezuka had been struggling to prove that he was as revolutionary and relevant as ever. The world of manga had changed drastically in the decade or so up to this point, and his ego refused to let that world move on without him. Thus, he forced himself to fit into a very particular mold of manga-making, imitating the newcomers without fully understanding what they were doing differently.
Tezuka couldn't find the success he craved until he finally did what many of the gekiga artists he envied had been doing for years: tap into something personal (in this case, his medical training) to say something profound about the world while creating an entertaining story. With his ambitions satisfied, he was able to move on with his manga career. While he continued to make more adult-oriented stories such as Buddha and A Message to Adolf, he also starting making kid-friendly manga again such as Unico and Don Dracula. Tezuka had finally realized that he could reach both audiences without compromising himself as an artist and his manga career was all the better for it.
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That’s not to say that everything in Tezuka's life was back on track after Black Jack became a hit. He had taken full responsibility for Mushi Production’s debts upon its closure, which totaled 220 million yen ($5.6 million in modern USD). He also took responsibility for the legal costs of the bankruptcy case for Mushi Production and its works, a struggle which dragged on for four long years. Tezuka would ultimately win the case and re-founded Mushi Production soon thereafter, but it would never be quite the same.
This second version of Mushi Production was not an independent studio but instead a contractor under the larger umbrella of Tezuka
Productions. They would work on a number
of films, OVAs, and TV over the next few decades, but almost entirely in support
roles: photography, in-betweening, coloring, and so forth. This version of Mushi Productions would continue to operate until 2018. By 2022, the studio building itself was shut down after one of Tezuka's heirs sued the staff for 11.5 million yen in back rent, a sad conclusion for what had once been one of the pioneering studios of anime.
Speaking of Tezuka Productions, they would sporadically produce animated works through the 1970s with most of it coming after Tezuka's legal battles were over. They began with a series of bizarre TV movies, all of them produced for an annual TV charity event , but eventually the studio would branch out into making TV series, feature films, and OVAs of their own. They continue to produce anime to this day, although in the last decade or so most of their works have been collaborations with other notable studios such as MAPPA or Tatsunoko.
Tezuka's busy career came to a halt after a diagnosis of stomach cancer in 1988, passing away from it shortly thereafter on February 9, 1989 at just 60 years old. In retrospect it's quite remarkable to see just how much he had transformed his career in the decade and a half between Mushi’s closure and his untimely passing. Once he had been a laughingstock, a man on the verge of failure and forced retirement. By the end of his life his legacy had been secured, his fortunes had been reversed, and he would forever be remembered as an innovator and a legend in the world of anime and manga, just as he always wanted.
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While at Office Academy, Yamamoto ended up getting involved with an ambitious new sci-fi project that Nishizaki and others were brainstorming. It was initially meant to be a tokusatsu-style show in the vein of Lord of the Flies, but Yamamoto retooled it to focus more on humanity overcoming a great disaster. After a few more drafts and another overhaul at the hands of mangaka Leiji Matsumoto, this series would become 1974’s Space Battleship Yamato. The show struggled in its initial run, as its high costs and low ratings forced the producers to cut the show’s length drastically while airing. It only found success after a compilation film was released in the wake of Star Wars in 1977, after which it went on to become one of the defining anime franchises of the 1970s. Yamamoto played a major role in that success, serving as a screenwriter on all three seasons of the TV series as well as for its final two film entries: 1980's Be Forever Yamato and 1983's Final Yamato.
Yamamoto’s career did
not end with Yamato, although he would never again work on anything quite so
influential and far-reaching. He continued to write and direct a number of documentaries and animated films through the 1980s and into the 1990s,
although the vast majority of them never saw release outside of Japan. Sadly, the most notable exception to this was one of his biggest failures, one that came about thanks to Yoshinobu Nishizaki and his desire for another Yamato-sized
hit.
This project was initially planned to be a new TV series, although it quickly morphed into a trilogy of films instead. The concept was clearly derivative of Yamato, as it too focused on a crew of attractive young men, a mysterious young woman and an elderly captain travelling deep into space to fight aliens on a spaceship that looked like an old-fashioned boat. It didn't help that Nishizaki brought in every ex-Yamato staff member he could find, along with many other notable directors, writers, designers, and animators of the era. Money was no object for Nishizaki and he spent it freely on what he presumed would be the first in an epic series of films, even as the production become increasingly chaotic. This was how Eiichi Yamamoto ended up becoming one of three credited directors and screenwriters on 1985's Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight.
Sadly, the efforts of Yamamoto and everyone else on Odin were for naught. The film had impressive visuals, but it was undermined by an interminable, half-baked story that was stretched to its breaking point long before concluding on an unsatisfying cliffhanger. Its glacial pacing and repetitive structure ensured that every minute of its two-and-a-quarter hour theatrical runtime felt like an eternity, and no amount of insert songs by the hair metal band Loudness or heavy edits by its American licensor could fix that. The film flopped in Japanese theaters, the planned sequels were never made, and the film went on to clutter up anime bargain bins for years to come. This wouldn't even be the last time Yamamoto got dragged into one of Nishizaki's attempts to re-do Yamato, as he also served as screenwriter on 1994's Yamato 2520. This was meant to be a OVA reboot of the franchise in much the same vein as Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that project fizzled out almost as quickly as it began and was never licensed overseas.
Arguably, Yamamoto’s greatest success during this time period was 1991’s The Sensualist, an adaptation of a book about an Edo-era hedonist helping a young man win over an illustrious courtesan for a bet. It was probably the closest Yamamoto got to creating another Belladonna of Sadness, even if he only served as the screenwriter. The film combined its sensual subject matter with a stunning visual style. Sadly it was seldom seen outside of its original Japanese release, save for a brief home video release in the UK in the early 1990s, and Yamamoto himself would quietly retire from animation not long thereafter. One of his last achievements was The Rise and Fall of Mushi Productions, a semi-fictionalized memoir of his time at the studio released not long after Tezuka's death in 1989.
Unlike Tezuka, he lived well into the new millennium. He would not pass away until 2021, although his passing would not be publicly announced for another six months. This mean that Eiichi Yamamoto got to
experience something that Tezuka could not. He lived long enough to watch the world
rediscover and redeem Belladonna of Sadness, and through it the entire Animerama trilogy.
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The Animerama trilogy might have been theatrical flops, but that didn't stop them from getting home video releases in just about every format possible in Japan. That's not to say that they were all great releases, as the VHS and Betamax editions from the early 1980s featured heavily edited versions of the films. They fared much better on disc-based formats, showing up not just on laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray but also obscure formats like VHD. They also received occasional revival theatrical screenings, some of which were documented in the anime magazines of the day. Some of these releases even inspired fanart.
Outside of Japan the Animerama films remained deeply obscure. There's evidence of at least one screening of Cleopatra in Montreal in 1974, along with screenings of Belladonna of Sadness in France, Belgium, and Spain around that same time. Outside of some DVD releases in Germany and France, the only way the rest of the world could experience these movies was by either importing one of those home video releases or hunting down a faded fansub. That wouldn’t begin to change until 2009, when the non-profit LA-based movie theater Cinefamily did a screening of Belladonna of Sadness alongside a number of other notable anime films. This screening is where Cinefamily founder Hadrian Belove was first exposed to the film, and it would linger in the back of his mind for the next five years.
This restoration process hit a major snag when the production team discovered that eight minutes of footage had been cut from the original negative. The reason for this turned out to be Eiichi Yamamoto himself. To celebrate the film's fifth anniversary, a theatrical re-release was planned in Japan. Yamamoto wanted to make the film more appealing to "art-loving high school girls" this time around, so he cut out eight minutes of the most graphic footage and added on a new ending about the French Revolution. One has to wonder if this, combined with his emphasis on a teenage audience, was his attempt to reach the same audience that would have been going crazy at the time for the anime version of The Rose of Versailles. He was dissatisfied with the end result, though, and would correct most of these edits for the film's first laserdisc release in 1986. In the meantime, no one ever went back to fix the original negative and the cut footage was subsequently lost.
After a long search, the restoration staff were able to track down what they believed to be the only surviving uncut print of Belladonna in an archive in Belgium. The team were able to work with the archive to scan and restore the missing footage, erase the French subtitles, and integrate the missing footage with the negative. Notably they kept the French Revolution-themed epilogue, the last remaining artifact of Yamamoto’s 1979 edit.
In 1973, Japanese audiences had no idea what to make of Belladonna of Sadness. Upon its release in theaters (and later Blu-Ray) in the 2010s, international critics and audiences alike were dazzled by its unconventional looks, feminist themes, and sense of daring. Within anime fandom it was a sensation. Gabriella Ekans notes in her review for Anime News Network:
“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 full appreciated for forty years. Now hindsight allows us to see the breadth and depth of its daring.”Nick Creamer rightfully says that he "can't say that Belladonna is an 'enjoyable film'...but Belladonna's furious anger carries through, along with a myriad spectacle of strange aesthetic wonders." ANN editor Lynzee Loveridge describes it Sight and Sound Magazine as:
"psychedelic, erotic, beautiful, and essentially feminist. It asserts that there is power within female sexuality and that only by harnessing that power can women regain their rightful spots as leaders of a revolution for both themselves and for a just society, morality be damned."
Mainstream film critics were equally impressed by the film. Soren Anderson of The Seattle Times said “It’s a classic tale of temptation and tragedy, of innocence lost and evil triumphant….subtle it is not.” Josh Kupecki of The Austin Chronicle recalls seeing the film decades ago on a third-generation bootleg, and recommends that for “those up for an adventure into the LSD-influenced world of counterculture animation, Belladonna of Sadness is a curious artifact that, after 43 years, remains a glorious mindfuck.” Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The AV Club declares it to be:
“one of the most unusual and challenging animated features of its time – no small feat, given that its contemporaries include not only Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet and the early works of Ralph Bakshi, but also Tezuka and Yamamoto’s A Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra....while the film may be too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss.”
The modern-day success of Belladonna of Sadness had something
of a ripple effect. Coverage of
the film raised public awareness not just of Belladonna, but the rest of the Animerama trilogy as well. This
increase in interest would eventually lead to both A
Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra finally getting home video releases outside of Japan.
The two films made their way through various European licensors, reaching the UK in 2018, and the US in 2020 courtesy of Discotek Media. Discotek’s release of A Thousand and One Nights
is particularly notable because they were able to secure a complete copy of the English dub from the Tezuka Production archives. The film they received was in poor shape visually, but the audio track was intact enough to be captured. The staff were able to combine this audio with the pre-existing high-definition video to recreate a version of the film that had not been seen by the public in over 50 years. In 2023 Discotek Media would reunite the trilogy with the announcement of their own UHD release of Belladonna of Sadness.
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In the program book for A Thousand and One Nights, Osamu Tezuka laid out his reasoning behind the Animerama films:
"Animation is not only for children. There should be animation that is suitable for adults. That is my specialist opinion, and for some time it has been my heart's desire to make 'animation for adults'....we named it Animerama in order to make a new world of animation emerge and hit back against traditional preconceived ideas."
It's easy enough for modern readers to smirk at this, knowing what we know now of how those films turned out. It's exceedingly easy to dismiss the entire Animerama project as a failed experiment, one that blew up in its creators' faces in the worst possible fashion. Personally, I feel that this is a short-sighted approach. After all, any good scientist can tell you that even failed experiments can yield useful data that can guide future efforts. I think that Tezuka was correct that there was a space within the world of Japanese animation for adult-oriented animation outside of the arthouse and I think that the Animerama films did help to forge a path for it. The biggest problem was the timing.
While there was some crossover with the adult audiences of the time, the true audience for adult anime would be the very same children who grew up with the family-friendly shows that Mushi Productions had built their reputation upon. That same audience would grow up to embrace the more mature anime franchises of the 1970s such as Yamato, Gundam, and Lupin the 3rd. By the 1980s this same audience would become the creators that fully realized Tezuka's dream. You could see echoes of that dream in the movie theaters of the time, where ambitious, original animated works like Akira and Robot Carnival flourished like never before. It could be found all over the OVA market, where independent creators and studios could pursue their vision without compromising it for general audiences. You could even see it in the emergence of hentai anime, proof onto itself that there was room for adult animation in every sense of the term.
While the Animerama films themselves were flawed, the philosophy behind their creation was not. Belladonna of Sadness alone is proof that when the idea of making avaunt-guard animated features for adults is taken seriously, one can produce a masterpiece even under the most limited and strenuous circumstances. This film in particular has gone on to become the most influential of the trilogy, inspiring anime directors such as Kunihiko Ikuhara and Sayo Yamamoto. That being said, giving Belladonna all the acclaim and treating the rest of the trilogy as failures is no less misguided than dismissing the trilogy as a whole. While neither of them can hold a candle to Belladonna thematically, they deserve to be recognized as radical, daring works in their own right.
A Thousand and One Nights is full of visually interesting set pieces that are both artful and economical and the entire film is infused with the inventive, can-do spirit that embodied many of Mushi Productions's best works. It's the film that I have come back to most often during my research, and I would dare say it's my favorite of the lot. Cleopatra may be the weakest of the three narratively, but it too deserves recognition for its moments of visual brilliance (many of them featuring key animation by Tezuka) and the sight gags that do work. I have friends who unironically enjoy its irreverent brand of gonzo energy and I've experienced first-hand how well it can work with modern audiences as a raucous group experience.
Mostly I'm just pleased that after decades of obscurity and misunderstanding that that all of the Animerama trilogy is readily, legally available to English-speaking audiences. These have been presented in their best, most complete forms and modern anime fans can assess and appreciate them on their own terms. It might have taken over half a century to get to this point, but the story of Animerama did eventually earn its happy ending. Perhaps it's not the ending its creators intended for it, but it's a happy ending nonetheless. After all, shouldn’t every good story end that way?
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Jonathan Clements. Anime: A History. BFI Palgrove. 2013.
Rayna Denison and S. Van der Peer. "1001 Nights and Anime: The Adaptation of Transnational Folklore In Tezuka Osamu's Senya Ichiya Monogatari/A Thousand and One Nights (1969)." Open Screens Journal, 4 (1). 2021.
"哀しみのベラドンナ" Wikipedia (Japanese)
Fred Patton. "The Last Days of Mushi Pro." 4/6/2014. CartoonResearch.com.
Natsu Onoda Power. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and The Creation of Post-World War II Manga. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson. 2009.
"千夜一夜物語." Wikipedia (Japanese)
Katie Skelly. "Restoring a Lost Psychedelic Anime Classic: An Interview With the Team Reintroducing Belladonna of Sadness." 9/23/2015. The Comics Journal.
Toadette. "Rintaro, 'New Moomin' (1972), and the Last Days of Mushi Pro." 3/23/23. On The Ones.
Mike Toole. "The Mike Toole Show: The Melancholy of Yoshinobu Nishizaki." 11/20/2011. Anime News Network.
Matteo Watsky. "The History of Mushi Pro - 05 - Farewell to Tezuka (1970 - 1972)." 7/29/2023. Animétudes.
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