Animerama: an Ambitious Trilogy

In modern times, there’s an expectation that almost all anime is edgy and mature. However, around the beginning of the medium, with early works like Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (1945) and The Tale of the White Serpent (1958), anime was mostly aimed at children with only relatively few works for adults.

By the late 1960s, with the rise of the Gekiga movement which demonstrated how manga could be targeted at adults, Osamu Tezuka sought to change society’s opinion of anime and established Animerama, a project to create adult animated feature films based on historical tales.

The first film of the trilogy was A Thousand and One Nights, a tale of a traveling water merchant called Aldin who falls in love with a slave girl named Miriam. What starts out as a relatively simple story expands to a sweeping epic with a wide cast of characters ranging from across the many tales of the literary One Thousand and One Nights.

While in many ways a strange film, it is nonetheless a very entertaining work with an interesting story, a stirring score and a variety of animation which ranges from regular high quality animation to the use of animated characters in real backgrounds and even a model city of Baghdad. It is a film that any fan of animation, let alone anime, should seek out and watch.

I have heard conflicting reports on whether or not A Thousand and One Nights succeeded in the box office but nonetheless, a second film was developed and released with the title of Cleopatra. Co-directed by Osamu Tezuka himself, Cleopatra tells the story of three humans from the far future who are sent back in time to ancient Egypt during the reign of Cleopatra.

Immediately, Cleopatra manages to outdo A Thousand and One Nights in strangeness with the characters of the far future having animated heads but real bodies! However, this oddity does not save the film from being a weaker entry than the first with a more awkward story that quite often relies too heavily on the sexual attractiveness of Cleopatra and too little on developing her character.

It doesn’t help that the film, in many ways, feels like a collection of experimental animation rather than a coherent story, with important moments such as the assassination of Julius Caesar and the triumphal parade in Rome used as moments to experiment with animation rather than progress the story. As much as I consider the Roman parade to be one of the greatest pieces of animation I have ever seen, it does nothing to progress the story.

Cleopatra bombed in the box office in Japan and this led to the last film of the trilogy to be solely directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, director of A Thousand and One Nights and co-director of Cleopatra, with little to no involvement from Osamu Tezuka. This led to the creation of Belladonna of Sadness, easily the most well constructed film but most difficult to watch of the trilogy.

It tells the story of a couple of newlyweds in medieval France named Jeanne and Jean. Jeanne is taken from her husband on her wedding night and is raped by the lord of the land. What follows is the story of a woman who develops a talent for witchcraft to help cope with her ordeals, with the help of the devil.

Belladonna of Sadness, while sharing the experimental nature of the previous two films, is a very different film from its predecessors with little to no humour and an artstyle closer to watercolour paintings than to other anime works. A common criticism of the film is the lack of animation with many still shots and limited animation but, nonetheless, it manages to be a more tonally consistent film than the prior entries that leaves you thinking about it for days after.

Animerama is a very strange and, in many ways, flawed film trilogy. It is, nonetheless, very entertaining. The various styles of experimental animation and its ambition to bring adult animation to the mainstream makes the trilogy worth seeking out for any fans of film, animation or anime.

Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!