Reseñas de la crítica

The film is eye-popping and ear-catching. The score, by the jazz pianist Masahiko Sato, might be characterized as "acid twang" in its evocation of Pink Floyd and Ennio Morricone. The movie's look is as flowery as its title. Still, the delicate lines and pastel splashes of color are frequently at odds with a sexual violence at once explicit and powerfully abstract.

The film displays a dazzling plethora of styles, telling its story with images animate, still or some combination of the two... I was conscious of being impressed by the film's myriad techniques, occasionally titillated by the dirty pictures, but never exactly moved by the relentless virtuosity – though I suspect it benefits to be stoned as a bat before popping in the Blu-ray, for Belladonna has all of the gonzo extravagancies that make for a cult rediscovery. (See: Hausu; Jodorwsky, Alejandro).

As was true with many instances of the sexual revolution on-screen in the U.S., these confrontations were clearly at the expense of women. Yet the visual experience of Belladonna of Sadness is truly unique, with watercolor textures and techniques that simply don't appear in narrative animated films. Carefully constructed and a little sloppy, alluring and disturbing, this gem deserves a trigger warning, but also a chance.

It stands as one of the most unusual and challenging animated features of its time—no small feat, given that its contemporaries include not only René Laloux'sFantastic Planet and the early features of Ralph Bakshi, but also Tezuka and Yamamoto's A Thousand And One Nights and Cleopatra... In lieu of [Osamu Tezuka's] rounded figures and lines, it looks to art nouveau, expressionist figure drawing, and the fashions of the time for influence, slipping through a dazzling array of styles.

It's compulsively watchable, even at its most disturbing: The imagery is frequently graphic, and still, after over 40 years, it has the power to shock. The narrative, however implausible, is seductive. And the meticulously executed visual freakouts are awe-inspiring... The variety of graphic modes — with references to fashion magazines, pop art, psychedelia, underground comics, arty pornography and much more — is dizzying.

Taking inspiration from Jules Michelet's Satanism and Witchcraft and the story of Joan of Arc, Belladonna of Sadness combines the Japanese pink film with more "respectable" Western high art—Eugène Delacroix's "Liberty Leading The People" provides the final and thematically summative image—to deliver a message as progressive as the images are shocking.

For all its wonderfully gonzo WTF moments, as when the diminutive, phallic Satan slowly grows in stature as Jeanne strokes him, there's also an underlying stately melancholy to the proceedings. The sadistic punishment of Jeanne's body is disturbingly ambivalent, both sensual and sinister, as she welcomes and resists her repeated onslaughts in equal measure.

Structured with the combination of a camera roving over still images and vibrant psychedelic imagery, the film is about the beautiful and chaste Belladonna's descent into sin and ascent into power. Adopting a style reminiscent of the works of the late 18th-century symbolist movement from Europe, director Eiichi Yamamoto uses strong lines, watercolours and a simple colour palette.

Having recently seen the restoration myself after years of anticipation, I was thrilled by its slow and steady animation style, reminiscent of the language of comics, its thumping soundtrack and painterly style, which I had never seen in animation prior.

It's a psychedelic jolt of freeform sensuality and Satanism... The sexual politics are an incoherent mess, but that ends up rather appropriate for a film whose best moments involve a polymorphous image of an orgy constructed out of ever-shifting phalluses and vaginas and mouths merging into new creatures disconnected from human form, in an ecstasy of revolt.