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Dis­cov­er the time-skip­ping eroti­cism of these clas­sic Japan­ese animes

18 Jun 2018

Words by Anton Bitel

A surreal landscape with stylised figures, comprising a red-cloaked figure, a nude woman with dark hair, and a large dark creature in the background. The artwork features bold, geometric shapes and a vibrant colour palette.
A surreal landscape with stylised figures, comprising a red-cloaked figure, a nude woman with dark hair, and a large dark creature in the background. The artwork features bold, geometric shapes and a vibrant colour palette.
Third Win­dow Films are releas­ing two Ani­mera­ma series films from Astro Boy cre­ator Osamu Tezuka.

Known var­i­ous­ly as the father, god­fa­ther and god of man­ga, Osamu Tezu­ka rev­o­lu­tionised com­ic books in Japan with influ­en­tial series like Astro Boy’, Kim­ba the White Lion’, Black Jack’ and Phoenix’. In 1963 he found­ed the com­pa­ny Mushi Pro­duc­tions and cre­at­ed an ani­mat­ed ver­sion of Astro Boy for tele­vi­sion – the first pop­u­lar Japan­ese series to deploy the aes­thet­ic that would become asso­ci­at­ed with ani­mé, and the first to be broad­cast over­seas (and dubbed into English).

In the late 1960s, Tezu­ka con­ceived and ini­ti­at­ed a new series of ani­mé fea­tures, known col­lec­tive­ly as Ani­mera­ma. These films were to look to the past (whether his­toric or myth­ic), were to be for­mal­ly exper­i­men­tal, and were to be aimed, with their erot­ic con­tent, at an adult audience.

Though the first film made under the Ani­mera­ma umbrel­la, Tezuka’s A Thou­sand And One Nights, was a box office hit in Japan, the oth­er two, Tezu­ka and Eiichi Yamamoto’s Cleopa­tra and Yamamoto’s Bel­ladon­na of Sad­ness, were com­mer­cial flops, lead­ing to the col­lapse of Mushi Pro­duc­tions. Part of the prob­lem was their inno­va­tion, which is nev­er easy to mar­ket to audi­ences look­ing for more of the same. The demo­graph­ic of pre­vi­ous ani­mat­ed fea­tures had been chil­dren and fam­i­lies, and there was no pre-exist­ing mar­ket for the bawdi­er con­tent of the Ani­mera­ma fea­tures (Ralph Bakshi’s much more suc­cess­ful Fritz the Cat came out two years after Cleopa­tra, but was direct­ly plugged in to a very spe­cif­ic Amer­i­can counterculture).

The lengths, too, of A Thou­sand and One Nights and Cleopa­tra – each clock­ing in at around a hefty two hours – were with­out prece­dent for ani­ma­tion at the time. The last of the three Ani­mera­ma titles, Yamamoto’s Bel­ladon­na of Sad­ness, is now the best known inter­na­tion­al­ly, not least because, after a very lim­it­ed the­atri­cal rere­lease in the US in 2009, it under­went a 4K restora­tion in 2015 and enjoyed a new life (and a crit­i­cal reassess­ment) in cin­e­mas. Yet, so many decades after their ini­tial box-office fail­ure and years in the wilder­ness of cin­e­mat­ic obliv­ion (the orig­i­nal Eng­lish-lan­guage dubs are appar­ent­ly lost for­ev­er), Tezuka’s first two fea­tures also mer­it new eyes and new atten­tion, and are now wel­come pre­cise­ly for their refusal to fit the cook­ie-cut­ter mod­el of ani­ma­tion from their own time.

First, a cor­rec­tive. Despite their rep­u­ta­tion as X‑rated’ ani­ma­tion, these films are not in the least bit porno­graph­ic. The dia­logue can be on the blue side, and women’s breasts are reg­u­lar­ly bared, but Tezu­ka is extreme­ly coy about show­ing the gen­i­talia of either sex, and the sex act itself is reduced to curvy, mul­ti-limbed abstrac­tions or visions of flow­ers with gap­ing tun­nels. Visu­al­ly this is the very soft­est of soft core, even if these sto­ry worlds are pop­u­lat­ed with the pri­apic and the promis­cu­ous, and if part of the mes­sage of Cleopa­tra, encap­su­lat­ed in its clos­ing theme song, is that We are all mon­keys” dri­ven by our ani­mal­is­tic urges.

A curi­ous exam­ple of ori­en­tal­ism done Japan­ese-style, A Thou­sand and One Nights cer­tain­ly draws from the Mid­dle East­ern cor­pus of folk­tales from which it has tak­en its name, but also con­flates and con­founds them to deliri­ous effect, while sex­ing them up no end. Aladdin (here called Aldin) merges into, and is express­ly con­fused with, Sin­bad, and under­goes all man­ner of adven­tures by land and sea. Tezuka’s merg­ing of tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion, still paint­ings, mod­ernist design and real footage makes for an any­thing-goes mode of fable where mag­ic and the unex­pect­ed always seem pos­si­ble, and where the very forms that con­sti­tute this sto­ry world are pre­sent­ed as unstable.

Mean­while, the inclu­sion of anachro­nis­tic items (the Caliph has, among his rare, exot­ic trea­sures, what look like a tele­vi­sion set and an auto­mo­bile; a tow­er­ing edi­fice, as it col­laps­es, reveals a label that self-ref­er­en­tial­ly if cyn­i­cal­ly reads Made in Japan”) fur­ther desta­bilis­es our grip on Tezuka’s fairy tale con­fec­tion. All the while, a trip­py colour palette and Isao Tomita’s psych-rock score ensure that the film’s sto­ry belongs as much to the late Six­ties as to some myth­ic peri­od in and around ancient Baghdad.

Stylised illustration depicting two people in an ornate, colourful environment with intricate patterns and bold, vibrant colours.

If Aldin, as a hum­ble itin­er­ant water ven­dor per­se­cut­ed by the wealthy and pow­er­ful, at first seems relat­able, by the film’s final act he has acquired rich­es and the caliphate for him­self, and we see the pow­er go right to his head as he tests how far a king can go” with a series of arbi­trary and destruc­tive procla­ma­tions. This con­cern with the cor­rupt­ing dynam­ics of pow­er is a cen­tral theme in Cleopa­tra too. which – per­haps unique­ly among the many film ver­sions of the Egypt­ian Queen’s tragedy – opens with a space­craft hurtling across the stars. This unex­pect­ed cou­pling of sci-fi future and his­toric past is typ­i­cal of the film’s slip­pery approach to time.

For in a city of the future, as caviar is served with cham­pagne (from an 1849 vin­tage), Jiro, Maria and Hal are informed by their chief that guer­ril­las from the plan­et Pasatorine are resist­ing the Earth’s Uni­verse Plan’, and have their own Cleopa­tra Plan’ pre­pared to assist their rebel­lion. In order to deter­mine what this mys­te­ri­ous­ly named plot might be, the trio are sent back in time via pro­to­type psy­cho tele­porters” which enable them to inhab­it the bod­ies of, respec­tive­ly, Caesar’s slave Ion­ius, Egypt­ian city girl’ Libya, and Cleopatra’s pet leop­ard Rupa.

Mean­while, Cleopa­tra is under­go­ing her own body swap, trans­formed by a magi­cian from a plain princess to the most beau­ti­ful woman the world has ever seen – all so that she can mur­der first Julius Cae­sar, then Mar­cus Anto­nius, and final­ly Octa­vian. Cae­sar, too, seems to har­bour more than one per­son­al­i­ty in his body – not just because he is a com­plex, mul­ti-faceted char­ac­ter but also because he is express­ly schiz­o­phrenic – and his roles as patri­ot­ic gen­er­al, pas­sion­ate lover and devot­ed hus­band seems mere per­for­mances, leav­ing every­one con­fused who the real Cae­sar’ is.

Like­wise Cleopa­tra is forced to play the part of seduc­tive assas­sin, and real­ly just wants to be loved for who she is, so that she finds her own alle­giances – no less than Jiro’s, Maria’s and Hal’s – being repeat­ed­ly test­ed. All are caught in time’s ebb and flow, in a sto­ry set across two very dis­tinc­tive time peri­ods where the human his­to­ry of erot­ic and ter­ri­to­r­i­al con­quest seems nonethe­less doomed ever to repeat itself.

The tone here is most­ly com­ic, but the mon­tage intro­duc­ing us to the Roman occu­pa­tion of Alexan­dria casu­al­ly sets depic­tions of mass tor­ture, rape and slaugh­ter (no doubt echo­ing what Earth lat­er has in store for Pasatorine) along­side goofy upskirt gags, all in a man­ner that lays out the grav­i­ty of the themes under­ly­ing the scabrous jokes. Mean­while, Cleopa­tra deploys sur­re­al anachro­nisms and transna­tion­al forms to sug­gest a con­tin­u­um between dis­parate eras and cultures.

It makes per­fect nar­ra­tive sense that Ion­ius, using Jiro’s future knowhow, can fash­ion grenades and a revolver dur­ing the Late Repub­lic of Rome, but far less sense that Caesar’s tri­umphal return to Rome should be accom­pa­nied by Toulouse Lautrec’s can-can dancers, Botticelli’s Venus, a wink­ing, top­less Mona Lisa, Dalí’s burn­ing giraffe, Bosch’s hell­ish mon­sters, Picasso’s abstrac­tions and var­i­ous Pop Art fig­ures; or that a self-con­scious Anto­nius should call his diminu­tive penis a com­pact car” com­pared to Caesar’s which was a dump truck that required a spe­cial licence”; or that an Arab Air­lines plane, a plum­met­ing air­ship and even a float­ing Apol­lo com­mand mod­ule should all be spot­ted dur­ing the naval Bat­tle of Actium.

There are even ref­er­ences to Tezuka’s own past (future) art: Rupa is seen using White Lion’ tooth­paste; and when, as Ion­ius is about to be killed in the Col­i­se­um, Cleopa­tra calls for a hero to save that man!”, there is a cut­away to Astroboy him­self fly­ing through space. Mean­while, the mur­der of Cae­sar in the Sen­ate is pre­sent­ed as a stylised nōh play, com­plete with flute-and-drum score and bam­boo trees paint­ed on a screen backdrop.

The point would appear to be that the dra­ma of love and pow­er played out here in Rome and Egypt – and repeat­ed in the con­flict between Earth and Pasatorine – sends its echo across time, space and art in every era of human­i­ty. It is a satir­i­cal, and rather unflat­ter­ing, depic­tion of our species (here renamed Pithecan­thro­pus Guer­ril­la­tus’ in song), col­laps­ing the dis­tance of Ancient Rome into a non-evo­lu­tion­ary, retro­fu­tur­ist, post­mod­ern time­line that includes and impli­cates us all. Third Win­dow Films’ new dou­ble-set is worth get­ting for this aston­ish­ing UFO alone – but A Thou­sand and One Nights, both sim­pler and sim­i­lar the­mat­i­cal­ly, rounds things off nicely.

A Thou­sand and One Nights and Cleopa­tra are released as a dou­ble-fea­ture in the world’s first ever Blu-ray and remas­tered DVD edi­tion by Third Win­dow Films on 18 June.

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