Film
Belladonna of Sadness
- Director
- Eiichi Yamamoto
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 86 mins
After being violently gang-raped by a village lord and his cronies on her wedding night, peasant girl Jeanne is visited by a little cock-shaped demon who transforms her into black-robed vision of madness and desire.
Based on the book Satanism and Witchcraft by French writer Jules Michelet, Belladonna of Sadness is the third and final film in the erotic animated Animerama trilogy, a forgotten masterpiece produced by the godfather of Japanese anime & manga Osamu Tezuka and directed by Eiichi Yamamoto (Astro Boy). Mostly animated in the form of a series of scrolling watercolour paintings, this transgressive psychedelic headtrip failed to find an audience on release back in 1973. It’s now been lovingly restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative, with eight minutes of censored naughtiness returned to its rightful place, and is back on screen in the Watershed’s More Than Miyazaki Japanese anime season.
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