'Belladonna of Sadness' Project to restore lost original artwork (Part 1).
● The 'swan song' of Mushi Productions, the legendary animated feature film Belladonna of Sadness.
*Honorifics in the text are omitted.
It is said that a swan makes its most beautiful call in its lifetime when it is about to burn itself out of life. This is called the 'swan song'.
The feature-length animation Belladonna of Sadness, released in 1973, is sometimes referred to as the film that "drove Mushi Productions into bankruptcy" due to the bankruptcy of the production company Mushi Productions Ltd (hereafter referred to as Mushi Pro) shortly afterwards, but this is not accurate. The company's financial difficulties had already begun before the film was produced, and it should be regarded as Mushi Productions' 'swan song', a work that it completed with all its last-ditch effort.
Mushi Pro, founded by Osamu Tezuka in 1961, was one of the first companies in Japan to start TV animation production, and established a new era of animation in Japan with a series of TV broadcasts based on popular Tezuka manga works, such as Astro Boy (63-66), Jungle Emperor Leo (65-66) and Princess Knight (67-68). The company built a new era of Japanese animation by broadcasting a series of popular Tezuka manga works on television.
On the other hand, Tezuka had an early idea of making animation for adults, which was realised in Mushi Pro' first feature-length film, The Thousand and One Nights (1969), which was billed as an Animarama. The film, which boldly depicted aesthetic and erotic scenes in animation with plenty of entertainment value, was a big hit, as was the second Animarama film, Cleopatra (1970).
However, in the 1970s, Mushi Pro' business deteriorated rapidly, and Tezuka was forced to find funding while he was busy writing manga.
In June 1971, Tezuka resigned as representative director of Mushi Pro. Eichi Yamamoto also left the company, but the board of directors of Mushi Pro pleaded with Yamamoto, who had supported Mushi Pro for many years as a director and co-directed the successful Animarama two-part series with Tezuka, to return to Mushi Pro in June 1972, and he was transferred from his new employer. Yamamoto was planning a feature film and turned his attention to the book "La Sorciere(The Witches)" by Jules Michelet, which was first fully translated into Japanese at the end of the 1960s.
● On Michele's ' La Sorciere(The Witches)'.
La Sorciere(The Witches) is a major work by 19th century French historian Jules Michelet, which explains the historical origins of witches and witchcraft, which were the background of the witch hunts that raged in the Middle Ages in Europe, from the rational perspective of modern man. The first and second volumes were published in 1967 by Gendai Shichosha and became the talk of the town.
The background to the birth of witches was the ignorance and poverty of the people brought about by the feudal society of the Middle Ages, also known as the 'Dark Ages', and the low status of women in particular. Some women, impoverished by the loss of their husbands, hid in the forests to gather medicinal herbs. Some of the medicinal herbs were hallucinogenic plants (narcotics) that could be used as both medicine and poison, such as belladonna, and these women were called witches by the church and were persecuted.
The discontent of the people, depressed by such poverty and discrimination, eventually led to the French Revolution as a simultaneous uprising in which women also participated. This is the truth of history as depicted by Michelet, and this book, which gets to the essence of the tragedy of those who were called witches, is sometimes called the world's first feminist literature.
Michelet is famous as a leading authority on European medieval history and the study of the French Revolution, and even those who do not know Michelet's name are not unfamiliar with the term 'Renaissance', which he invented.
Yamamoto was impressed by this work. The times were a time when the Cold War and the Vietnam War were bogged down and it seemed that the destruction of the world was about to become a reality. Drugs were prevalent among young people and a psychedelic revolution was under way. It was also the heyday of pop culture, including the Beatles. The Beatles' own project, the animated feature Yellow Submarine (1969), was released and became a huge hit, and the experimental techniques used in the film were highly regarded as art animation as well as music animation. The success of this film was the direct impetus for the production of Belladonna of Sadness. （*Notes.)
It was also the time of the rise of feminism as a women's liberation movement (feminism was then called women's lib). The conditions were ripe for the establishment of Belladonna of Sadness.
(*Note) Surprised by the unexpected success of Yellow Submarine, the screening theatre Miyukiza (now TOHO Cinemas Hibiya) approached Nippon Herald (now Kadokawa Herald), which distributed Mushi Pro' Animeramas, asking if they could release more films like that, which This led to the production of Belladonna of Sadness.
●The best work of director Eichi Yamamoto
Eichi Yamamoto quit the animation studio where he had been working in 1960 when he heard that Tezuka Osamu was going to create an animation production company. Tezuka was delighted to have Yamamoto, who had experience in animation production, join the company. Yamamoto started out as an animator, but after moving to the new company, he emerged as a director.
In Mushi Pro' first film, A Street Corner Story (62), Yamamoto is credited as 'director' along with Yusaku Sakamoto, who also participated in the founding of Mushi Pro at the same time. Alongside these two names, the name Gisaburo Sugii (Gisaburo) can also be seen in the original picture credits. Sakamoto and Sugii both transferred from Toei Doga and contributed to the establishment of production methods, including the direction of many Mushi Pro animations, especially TV animations. Gisaburo Sugii is still prominent as an active animation director
Yamamoto commissioned Yoshiyuki Fukuda, a veteran of live-action films, to write the script and appointed Sugii as the animation director. However, the choice of Kuni Fukai, a painter who had previously had no connection with animation, for the art direction determined the direction of the film. The main reason why Belladonna of Sadness is not only Leaichi Yamamoto's masterpiece but also a unique and isolated work of animation is because of Fukai's artwork.
● Crossing the boundaries between 'art' and 'character' in animation.
Kuni Fukai first debuted as a rental book cartoonist, but switched to painting (illustration) in the mid-1960s. He specialised in Western-style paintings of beautiful women, and his illustrations, which combined a high artistic quality with a popular appeal, attracted attention abroad at an early stage, and in 1965 his paintings of beautiful women decorated the show windows of the Printemps department store in Paris. Fukai's paintings had international appeal.
When Leaichi Yamamoto approached Fukai about participating in the film, he was perplexed. He had never seen animation before and had never been involved in it as a job. He also asked Fukai to do not only the character design but also the artwork.
In animation, 'art' and 'character' are completely different domains. When the term 'art' is used in animation, it mainly refers to backgrounds that do not move. Art directors such as Nizo Yamamoto and Kazuo Oga are well-known for their art for Miyazaki's animations, but they draw motionless backgrounds, not characters.
Character drawing is the domain of animators. The animator draws the character's movements in sections on a number of transparent cels, which are superimposed frame by frame on the motionless background (art), so that the character appears to move within the background (although cels do not exist in recent digitally produced animation, the relationship between background = still image and character = moving image remains the same).
However, Fukai drew the characters and the background on one sheet of paper at the same time, just as he usually does with his illustrations. What happens then is that the film is a projection of an image that does not move.
As a result, Belladonna of Sadness is a highly unusual work for an animated film, with 70% of the entire film being still images and about 30% moving animation.
Of course, Yamamoto had a winning strategy. He thought that if he just shot still images, they wouldn't make a film, but by moving the camera, he could add movement to the screen. He thought that if he added actors' voices and music, it would become a film.
When famous artists such as Fukai participate in animation, they are often asked to do only character design and then the animators draw celluloid pictures of the characters arranged to make them easier to move around in animation. Yamamoto probably thought that this would kill Fukai's beautiful drawings.
This method, which is unusual for animation, was chosen out of respect for the artistic quality of Fukai's drawings. Conversely, the quality of Fukai's drawings as still images is what makes this film work possible.
If one wonders whether there have been films with this kind of technique in the past, there have in fact been. The film Ninja Bugeicho (1967) was an adaptation of a gekiga by Shirato Sanpei by live-action film genius Nagisa Oshima. Oshima, who was a fan of Shirato's comic books, took close-up photographs of paper manuscripts drawn by Shirato for the book, moving the camera horizontally and vertically, and had regular Oshima film actors such as Akiko Koyama, Rokuhiro Toura and Kei Sato do the voice acting to create a brilliant feature film. The Ninja Bugeicho trailer refers to this as a 'feature film gekiga' rather than an animation.
In directing Belladonna, Eichi Yamamoto probably had Nagisa Oshima's experimental film Ninja Bugeicho in mind.
● Original Belladonna artwork that has been discarded, scattered and lost.
Belladonna of Sadness was released in June 1973. The film was entered in the Berlin Film Festival that same year and received some very appropriate and positive reviews, although some families who entered the festival thinking it was a children's animation film were appalled by its extreme content and protested to the secretariat. The following is an extract from the Wikipedia entry on that occasion.
“Among these films, the first Japanese feature-length animated film will be mentioned. It is Belladonna of Sadness, by the young director Eichi Yamamoto and the talented, methodical and prodigious design artist Fukai Kuni. （The film is a seamless fusion of myriad styles, from medieval Gothic illustration to Beardsley, Young Stylists and Pop Art, in an endless symphony of supernatural beauty and utterly erotic power. It is a truly great film in the history of cinema. However, like many great films, it will also encounter many misunderstandings and misconceptions."
The German critic's name is unfortunately not on Wikipedia, but it must be said that it is a truly accurate critique of the essence of the work and of the end to which it will lead.
As the reviews predicted, this excessively fearless film was a box-office dud. At the time of its screening at the Berlin Film Festival, the film is said to have ended with the crumbling corpse of Jeanne, who had been executed by fire, followed by the echoing laughter of the devil played by Tatsuya Nakadai, but this was so unpopular that Yamamoto cut this laughter when the film was shown on the road in Japan. This was so unpopular that Yamamoto cut it out when the film was released on the Japanese roadshow circuit.
Also, when the film was re-released in 1979, Yamamoto cut scenes that he considered too sexually extreme. This was done to make the film more accessible to women, and is known as the 'college girl version'. The version that can be seen today restores the scenes that were cut in the women's college version, inserts a picture of the French Revolution starting with the attack on the Bastille prison at the end, inserts the subtitle 'It was women who led the French Revolution' and ends with a large picture of Delacroix's 'The Statue of Liberty leading the people'. The film ends.
By pushing the feminist theme to the end, it may have been intended to convey to the audience that this was in fact a women's film, but the animation director, Sugii Gisaburo, strongly opposed the idea, saying, "How can a film-maker explain the theme in words?
Despite these efforts, Belladonna of Sadness failed to recover its production costs, and in November 1973, about five months after the film was released, Mushi Pro went bankrupt (the following January 1974, the Tokyo District Court declared the company bankrupt).
According to sources, several hundred original art drawings of Belladonna, which took Fukai two years to draw, had been piled up in a corner of the film company's warehouse for a long time. Animation film Director Sunao Katabuchi , who has been in the warehouse, told me that he witnessed a large number of large, horizontal and vertical original drawings that were difficult to take out and were stacked haphazardly and covered in dust.
It is confirmed that about eight of the originals are now in the possession of collectors, but hundreds of other originals are believed to have been discarded, leaked or dispersed. (Continued in Part Two)
