This is Animerama

If you're an anime fan for very long, you inevitably run across the existence of anime pornography, and if you were an anime fan in the '80s or '90s, you always had to thread the delicate needle of explaining to polite company that you were a fan of animation for adults, not "adult animation." Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The origins of adult anime, more commonly known as "hentai" can be traced back to a group of films released at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Not the first, but easily the most influential hentai were a trilogy of features from Studio Mushi, the first two co-directed by the beloved creator of "Astro Boy," Osamu Tezuka. "1001 Arabian Nights" (1969), "Cleopatra" (1970), and "Belladonna of Sadness" (1973) were known as the "Animerama" films, intended to be a mix of anime and drama aimed at adult audiences. Tezuka was always a boundary-pusher and active in experimental film and manga projects throughout his career, so this wasn't out of character for him. "A Thousand and One Nights" was successful upon initial release, and the other two were not.

The Animerama films slid into obscurity for several decades, but "Belladonna of Sadness" has long been a cult favorite and underwent a critical reevaluation and restoration a few years ago thanks to Cinefamily. Helmed by Eiichi Yamamoto, who was also a director on the first two Animerama films, "Belladonna" is a much more serious work with arthouse aspirations. Structurally it's your basic rape and revenge flick, where a peasant woman named Jeanne (Aiko Nagayama) is violated by the local nobleman (Masaya Takahashi), and makes a deal with the Devil (Tatsuya Nakadai!) to gain power. It has a lot of sex in it, but depicted with mostly psychedelic surrealist imagery. There are some absurdist elements, like the Devil having a phallus for a head, but there's not a lot here you could really call comedic. The animation itself is extremely limited due to the low budget, and many scenes are really just narration or songs over still images. However, those images contain some stunners, including nightmarish watercolor backgrounds and a few sequences of free-form animated sensuality and erotica that nicely straddle the line between art and pornography.

I saw "Belladonna of Sadness" back in 2016, and enjoyed it, but didn't realize at the time it was part of a trilogy. Ironically, I'd run across "Cleopatra" and "A Thousand and One Nights" before, when I was reading up on old indie animated films from the '70s. "Cleopatra" had been retitled "Cleopatra: Queen of Sex" for the U.S. release, so I figured it was one of the ignominious "Fritz the Cat" ripoffs of the era, like "Down and Dirty Duck" or "Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle." I finally stumbled upon original versions of "Cleopatra" and "A Thousand and One Nights" recently, and took the opportunity to watch them both. Unlike "Belladonna," these films are comedic pastiches, with a lot of zany gags, wild tangents, and nutty scenarios. "Cleopatra" has a science-fiction framing device where three time travelers are sent back to ancient Egypt to look for information on foiling an alien invasion.

And, I'm sorry to say that neither "A Thousand and One Nights" or "Cleopatra" hold up very well, in spite of larger budgets and more polished production values. Both films are these lengthy, sprawling adventure stories that run over two hours apiece. Despite a lot of bawdy humor and rape threats, the sex scenes are actually fairly brief, especially in "A Thousand and One Nights." The female characters are frequently running about bare-breasted, but there's no sign of any genitalia or explicit sexual activity, except in the most abstract form. Instead, "A Thousand and One Nights" is a mashup of several "Arabian Nights" stories, starring a wandering bum named Aldin (Yukio Aoshima). "Cleopatra" is a wildly melodramatic retelling of the life of Cleopatra (Chinatsu Nakayama), and her relationships with Julius Caesar (Hajime Hana) and Marc Antony (Osami Nabe).

I struggled during both films to find adequate points of comparison. "A Thousand and One Nights" was easier to parse. Aldin is a trickster hero who sort of resembles the Monkey Punch version of Lupin the Third, a genial ne'er-do-well pervert, who falls in love with the wrong girl and experiences some extreme bouts of good and bad luck. His adventures range from tender romance to Loony Toons style antics. The characters have no depth whatsoever, but the action is flashy and the buffoonery is very energetic. There's also a lot of leering misogyny here, especially the treatment of Aldin's beloved, a passive slave girl named Miriam (Kyoko Kishida). "A Thousand and One Nights" mostly just comes across as outdated and bizarre from a modern perspective, the humor very juvenile, and the sexuality pretty perfunctory.

Then there's "Cleopatra," which gives us a tragic heroine to take more seriously, but insists on including ridiculous elements like a zany pet leopard, a wacky wizard who gives the homely Egyptian queen a makeover, and the aforementioned time traveller framing story. Caesar has green skin for no apparent reason, and Marc Antony is a meathead provincial who has to be reassured that it doesn't matter that he's not as well-endowed as his predecessor. The film is clearly taking many of its cues from the 1963 version of "Cleopatra," that nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox, and it doesn't surprise me that Tezuka and Yamamoto's "Cleopatra" pretty much bankrupted Mushi Studios. It's a weird cinematic mishmash of different tones, underdeveloped ideas, and never enough guts or focus to really deliver the kind of impactful drama that the material presents so much opportunity for.

The animation nerd part of me does appreciate both of these earlier films for their occasional psychedelia sequences, with homages to other artists and influences. They're a good example of various anime character and design tropes of the era. Occasionally there are little moments of wonderful creativity, like depicting Caesar's assassination in the form of a Noh drama. "A Thousand and One Nights" remains one of the longest animated films ever made, and there's some earnest boundary-breaking with the adult material. However, it wouldn't be until Studio Mushi was in its shaky final days and Eiichi Yamamoto got full creative control, that we would get "Belladonna of Sadness," the only Animerama film that seemed truly committed to being about adult subjects and sexuality.
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