Renaissance Josei

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.

 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. __________________________ Strictly speaking, Belladonna of Sadness is not an Animerama film.   While there were vague plans for a third film when the project was first conceived, these were never fully developed.   The true inspiration behind this film was the famous animated adaptation of The Beatles’ Yell...

  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. ________________________ While Tezuka was generally pleased with how A Thousand and One Nights turned out, he was stil...

Osamu Tezuka, Eiichi Yamamoto, and the rest of the staff at Mushi Productions had nothing but high hopes for the Animerama film series when it started.  They believed they could produce a film as lavishly animated as anything that had come out of Toei with cutting-edge content to boot.  In some ways, it felt like a return to the early days of the studio.  Just as before, though, those hopes were dashed by the realities and complications of making a feature-length animated feature.   The production of A Thousand and One Nights was marked by uncertainty, experimentation, indulgence, and chaos.   Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film isn’t how it looks or the story it tells, but that the end result turned out so well in spite of its origins.

In the fall of 1967, Osamu Tezuka met with staff director Eiichi Yamamoto, who brought along with him his friend and former Mushi animator Gisaburo Sugii.   Tezuka  had received an interesting proposition earlier in the year that he wanted to discuss with them.   He had received an offer to make a series of feature-length animated films specifically targeted at adult audiences.   These films were meant for mainstream release not just in Japan, but in theaters worldwide.   Yamamoto and Sugii were intrigued by the idea but they also had serious concerns.   Who would be paying for such a venture?   Did they have enough time and animators at Mushi Productions to make such a thing happen?   Would the public accept such an idea? Tezuka listened to all their questions and concerns and responded with a single, calm statement: “We can do it.”  

In the 1960s, one of the first studios to make anime for television was Mushi Productions.  Towards the end of that decade, their desire to innovate would lead them to produce a trilogy of animated films under the label of “ Animerama .”  These films were a major gamble on their part, a means by which they could tap into both adult and international audiences.  This gamble ultimately ended in failure, and for many decades these films lingered in obscurity.  It’s only in recent years that modern viewers have been able to rediscover them and reassess their place in the history of Japanese animation. This is the first is a series of essays chronicling the history behind this ill-fated trilogy.  It will explore the careers of the two men who helped bring these films into existence, the fate of the studio that killed itself making them, and the legacy of their work on the Animerama films and beyond. This is the story of Animerama.