In 1973, the Japanese equivalent of Walt Disney decided to adapt a 19th century book about the feminist history of witchcraft into an animated prog-rock musical about a medieval peasant girl who gets gang-raped on her wedding night and then turns to Satan for help with her revenge. This is really a thing that happened. Strange even by the impossibly high standards of Japanese cinema, the wild and exhausting "Belladonna of Sadness" was conceived by Osamu Tezuka — the godfather of manga — as the third and final chapter of Mushi Productions' Animerama trilogy (a series of explicitly adult animated films that also included erotic riffs on "Cleopatra" and "A Thousand and One Nights").

Tezuka would drop out of the…

The way things have always been. The way things have always been done. The way things will always be. A trinity of poisonous lies.

A world run on murder, rape, torture, privation, the annihilation of all known being in exchange for second-order abstract value meaningless without the existence of life on earth. Is this not sacrifice enough? What more should be sacrificed and for what?

The Satanic Witch draws their power from the time and space after trauma, privation, torture, rape, death, when what has been allotted by the empty promises of rights and station and labor and position has been stripped from you by the very entities who proposed giving you these things in the first place. When all…

Belladonna of Sadness is based on Jules Michelet’s Witchcraft, Sorcery and Superstition, a novel that chronicled witchcraft, and the persecution of women accused of it, in Europe. It is an unusual and rather dubious Japanese animated feature that centres on a recently married French woman, Jeanne, who is raped on her wedding day and then disowned by her husband before meeting the devil (quite literally a cock in more ways than one) whilst in exile. What follows is Jeanne’s drawn out humiliation and systematic debasement.

This is a hentai film masquerading as worthy art yet I found its subject matter troubling. Supporters will say the film’s depiction of sex is frank and provocative yet I found it all rather repellent…

um sorry but i think this is just straight up gross - it's another faux 'female empowerment' story that has been done over and over again (always.... by..... men....). yes, the visuals are technically great, but they did nothing for me either because i spent the whole time uncomfortably aware that a man was behind them. besides that, the film is way too reliant on visual metaphors to the point of overkill (flower = vagina? never seen that one before! also satan doesn't need to be represented as a penis every 2 secs for me to #understand). jeanne seems to purely exist as a visual spectacle (for men) for at least 45 mins of the film before apparently gaining any sort…

Belladonna of Sadness is an erotic Japanese animated rock opera that is hauntingly gorgeous through its explicit imagery and spellbinding soundtrack. It tells a medieval folklore tale through almost entirely still images and sublime Japanese voice acting, with the occasional musical number periodically appearing. The sensual theme song resonates throughout the story, crawling into the mind to solidify its entrancing tune that perfectly resonates the melancholy tale.

This is a love story unlike anything you've ever seen and possibly will ever see. Nearly every frame is either covered with brutal violence or explicit sexual imagery, but none of the sexual portions feel stimulating in any way. Rather, the images feel like individual pieces of art, desiring to tell a story…

Inspired by tales of witchcraft in the Middle Ages from nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet's non-fiction book La Sorcière, Belladonna of Sadness is an adult anime which is an angry yet sympathetic work that's intended to signify the unimaginable trauma of a woman sexually assaulted and later condemned as a witch. Directed and co-written by Eiichi Yamamoto, who conveys the protagonist's psychological collapse with a perpetually shifting parade of ceaseless phantasmagorical visions. It's a genuine amalgamation of styles, and there's a discernible sense that the filmmaker's creativity was at a pinnacle.

While the transforming and diversifying stylistic abundances may ultimately be the main point of the film, they are often fascinatingly beyond straightforward descriptions but typically absurdist. There are also…