Anime Impact. Chris Stuckmann
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Jeanne a witch and an enemy of the village, forcing her to flee into the arms of the Devil. Broken, beaten, and abandoned by everyone around her, she succumbs to temptation and offers her soul to him.
When Jeanne makes her pact, she is oddly confused and disappointed that she—a God-fearing Christian—didn’t turn into an ugly witch. In fact, the Devil insists she has only become more beautiful. After weeks, months, perhaps even years of unspeakable abuse from the village and the sovereignty (despite all that she has done for them), she pursues even more punishment by entering a tryst with the Devil. A life that has been predicated upon sacrifice and violence would know little else, and it takes a carnal act to shake her from the dirge of her suffering and make her realize what she can truly do.
In a stunning reversal of the typical rape-revenge story, Jeanne uses the pact she made not to punish the villagers who chased her out. The cruelty they have suffered under the pious tyranny of the Baron and Baroness, and the devastation left by The Black Death, is punishment in of itself. Instead, she uses her newfound knowledge to cure the sick and lead them to a better life free of the oppressive Christian dogma that has choked the life from them. At this point, the film takes cues from the electric acid-soaked revolution going on in America at the time and equates this better life to free love. The climax, so to speak, revolves around the townsfolk freeing themselves of restraint and releasing generations of sexual frustration. The film frames this massive orgy as both chaotic, and yet wholly good. In fact, it seems that the Devil is not so much the adversary that fell from grace, but a spirit that represents what the powerful Baron and Baroness deemed evil: lust, passion, emotional honesty, and love.
The great irony of Belladonna is that, while this film was created in part by the hands that typified the anime style, it is anything but typical anime. Characters aren’t drawn, they are painted and etched. Jeanne’s face, which the camera frequently holds onto tightly, speaks of the hardships she has weathered. The airiness and brightness of the colors almost appear in conflict with the hard-bitten story being told.
At first glance, the film feels like what would happen if Ralph Bakshi had directed Yellow Submarine: bold, striking, clashing uses of watercolor, all animated in a minimalist but effective manner. The scenes of the villagers unleashing their sexual angst are the crowning technical achievement of the film. Intimately connected bodies writhe and undulate, becoming like the ebb and flow of a river. Organs from both genders fold and stretch to create abstract visions of life and growth. The music is a cacophony of erratic drums, wandering bass, and free-form guitar. The music leads the revelry with every lick and shift.
This marvelous use of both color and sound also applies to the decidedly uglier scenes of the film. The many scenes of Jeanne being assaulted are not made easier to experience by its aesthetic, but they are made more thematically appropriate. During the aforementioned gang rape, we are never explicitly shown what she is experiencing, but her agony is unmistakable. A red, phallus-shaped energy penetrates Jeanne at the base of her pelvis, and it quickly shoots through her body as she cries out in anguish and pain. Along with these scenes, Jeanne herself spends much of the film’s running time in a state of either partial or complete nudity. And while these segments may be considered arousing, seeing as how it is part of an erotic series of movies, the film never comes across as exploitative. The intent appears not to be titillation, but horror as viewers are made witness to what happens to Jeanne. This galvanizes Jeanne’s agency as she lets go of her own personal shame and embraces her own sexuality, and inspires the villagers to do the same.
Belladonna of Sadness is a historically brave film in its willingness to break convention and push past taboo. It forces the viewer to reconsider their personal definition of what “anime” is. In film and on television, the term “anime” is a subjective, aesthetic-based one that undermines the art by forcing the whole of the medium into a single category. Good from a marketing perspective, but entirely restrictive for everything else. Belladonna of Sadness is an anime, but it doesn’t look like it, which throws a gigantic wrench into the gears of conversation and forces everyone to reconsider what anime looks like, or rather, what could anime look like.
One could be more than forgiven if they are put off by the frankness of its sexual politics, or its depictions thereof. It is not a simple viewing, and it was never intended to be. No personal history of the art of anime is complete without at least knowledge of the film: a draining, empowering, beautiful, ugly yarn called Belladonna of Sadness.
Bennett White has been making content on the Internet for a decade, stretching from video games to anime, and has aggregated over twenty million lifetime views. He currently resides in Northern California.
Kyûtî Hanî
&
Shin Kyûtî Hanî
— Joshua Dunbar —
By the time Go Nagia’s original Cutie Honey anime debuted in 1973, the magical girl style show was well on its way to becoming an established genre in Japan. The origins of the magical girl genre can be traced back to the imported American sitcom Bewitched. Today, many viewers associate magical girls with things like Super Sentai (Power Rangers in the US)—cute girls fighting evil and engaging in good versus evil like operas, but this was not always the standard. Like Bewitched, early magical girl manga and anime series focused less on combat scenarios and more on the complications that arose from having supernatural powers in the mortal realm. One of the earliest and most notable examples, Sally the Witch, tells the story of a young girl from a magical kingdom who is sent to the mortal realm to make friends her own age. The original Cutie Honey anime was to be more along these lines, focusing more on Honey’s changing ability and less on combat. However, circumstances resulted in the show being assigned to a time slot previously held by shows designed for a male audience. In an effort to retain this demographic, Cutie Honey was adjusted to include more action sequences and nudity during the transformation sequences.
It would be a stretch to consider the original anime’s Hannah-Barbera-esque cartoon visuals pornographic-Honey resembled something along the lines of a spinning, naked Barbie doll. Limitations of 1970s animation techniques not withstanding—the show is as ambitious in its set pieces as it is sexual. Cutie Honey does not titter around with the usual fan-service. Often within the magical girl genre, the audience may be surprised by a sudden up-skirt shot or the heroine caught (or tied) up in some sort of compromising position. These moments can be jarring and leave viewers asking, “Did they intend it to be interpreted that way?” In the world of Cutie Honey, the fan-service is as blatant as it is pervasive. There is no room for the viewer to wonder or consider the intent of the writer or animator. Honey is not even safe from her school’s headmistress—a bizarre mustached woman harboring a confusing romantic obsession. Honey is aware that she holds this type of appeal, and depending on her mood, can be amused, excited, and even bored by the commotion her transformative power causes.
Initiated by the words, “Honey Flash!” Honey’s signature power allows her to change her attire into anything she wishes. The changes are not just cosmetic—a transformation into a biker or pilot grants superhuman operator skills. Even a transformation into a rock star comes with the ability to dance and sing far beyond the level of an ordinary human.
Certainly, Honey’s ever-changing appearance makes her tailor-made for a girl’s doll line, but by turns the exciting swordplay and array of monstrous villains could give He-Man and the Masters of the Universe a run for their money. By the 1990s, this cross-media synergy would become the norm in anime and manga. All things considered, Cutie Honey may have pioneered the more action-driven magical girl heroine as well as cemented the fan-service phenomena.
If the original Cutie Honey kicked off a fan-service craze, 1994’s New Cutey Honey ran it into the end zone. Slickly animated and lots of bold, brassy characters, this OVA (Original Video Animation) is a huge, fun, sexy comedy everyone is invited to. A sequel to the original series, once again Honey finds herself the object of