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Something uncanny was in the air in the late 1960s and early ’70s. A lively curiosity in witchcraft, paganism, and occultism, rose out of the counterculture movement, finding its way into popular entertainment in the form of folk horror and other similarly-themed movies. Perhaps the most notorious was “The Devils,” Ken Russell’s orgy of unbridled lust and religious mania set in medieval France. Also treading along a scandalous path was Elichi Yamamoto’s stunning “Belladonna of Sadness,”\u00a0a controversial adult animated feature that broke its studio.<\/p>\n
This psychedelic arthouse trip was the third and most challenging of the “Animerama” films from Mushi Production in Japan. It was a radical departure for\u00a0writer and director Yamamoto, who built his career in the ’60s making\u00a0cuddly children’s TV shows like “Astro Boy” and “Kimba the White Lion.” He was a key figure in early anime, but “Belladonna”\u00a0has a distinctly European flavor;\u00a0inspired by\u00a0“La Sorci\u00e8re,” Jules Michelet’s\u00a0study of witchcraft in the middle ages, it tells the story of a young French woman who is subjected to sexual violence by local nobility before striking a deal with the Devil and becoming a powerful witch.<\/p>\n
The film was a labor of love for Yamamoto; working with artist Kuni Fukai, the\u00a0painstakingly illustrated film took six years to complete. Sadly, they pushed the experimental style too far and it failed to find an audience at the box office, sealing the fate of Mushi Production. The studio shuttered its doors within a year of “Belladonna” hitting theaters. The\u00a0mystique as a hard-to-find cult item only grew over the decades before it received a belated stateside release in 2016, where it was greeted as an intensely polarizing curio and one of the saddest anime movies ever made<\/a>.<\/p>\n