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 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…

Belladonna of Sadness is a lot of different things. It's an older well told cliche of a story. It's extremely rough in how it portrays the suffering of Jeanne, the main character. It's also amazingly gorgeous in style.

You would think an animated movie that does so little animation would not be as expressive as it is. Most scenes are either vividly colorful or on a stark white background. There may be a simple movement like a head movement or banging on the door but the movie feels more alive than it shows.

The music is very much a product of its time. A lot of psychedelic rock intertwined with scene music and sometimes flowing one into the other. One…

Belladonna of Sadness has a unique look to its art and animation that finds that very Japanese sweet spot at the intersection of "bold, effective stylization" and "a cost-saving measure." Although semi-animated, much of the film is told via static, sparse watercolor paintings and sketches that the camera pans across. Whether or not this was always the vision for the film, or if it was just done this way so it could be made on the cheap, the bottom line is that it works. The art is gorgeous, evocative and, at times, extremely trippy.

It seems as though the filmmakers believe that they were making a feminist film. I'm not sure any movie that wallows this much in female degradation,…