It is particularly noteworthy for its use of tentacles as penis substitutes (original creator Maeda Toshio, now considered the godfather of hentai manga, has said he wants his headstone engraved with ‘Tentacle Master’).
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The film, which is actually three stitched-together OVAs (original video animations, straight-to-video projects whose production values sit somewhere between those of a TV episode and a cinema release), is considered a classic of the hentai pornographic – genre. That said, neither the more traditionally cartoonish A Thousand and One Nights (1969) nor Cleopatra (1970 – released in the US a couple of years later as Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, a week after Fritz the Cat became animation’s first-ever X-rated feature) gave much hint of the out-there artistry of Belladonna. The leap from such family fare to animated erotica might seem jarring, but Tezuka himself was no prude, spending the 1970s exploring adult themes in manga such as The Book of Human Insects (1970-71) and MW (1976-78). Born in the midst of Japan’s ‘pink film’ boom – when directors brought creative titillation to the arthouses – it was the third in an informal trilogy of adult anime conceived and produced at Tezuka Osamu’s Mushi Production studio, marketed under the ‘Animerama’ banner and all directed by Yamamoto Eiichi, a Tezuka collaborator since the days of Astro Boy (1963-66) and Kimba the White Lion (1965-67).
An outlier from the moment of its conception, Belladonna of Sadness is a psychedelic watercolour trip that is as lurid as it is tragic.