Best known for Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka also helped create one of animation’s boldest experiments: the Animerama Trilogy. Comprising A Thousand and One Nights, Cleopatra, and Belladonna of Sadness, these films pushed the boundaries of adult animation with sex, surrealism, and social critique. This essay explores their evolution and legacy.
Tag: Fantasy
Masters of the Universe (1987) – Review
1987’s Masters of the Universe is one of those gloriously misguided Cannon Films productions that swings for the stars and lands somewhere behind a California strip mall. It’s a movie that dares to ask, “What if cosmic fantasy looked like a low-budget cop drama?” The result is a fascinating, baffling, occasionally entertaining mess that somehow…
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985) – Review
Some films feel like they were carefully crafted. Others feel like they were assembled out of spare parts found behind a medieval-themed garage sale. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom proudly belongs to the second category, a scrappy, barely coherent artifact of the low-budget empire run by Roger Corman. It’s cheap, chaotic, and accidentally fascinating in…
The Ice Pirates (1984) – Review
In a galaxy where water is more valuable than gold, and fashion is stuck in a Renaissance festival, one man and his crew of space degenerates will steal ice, battle space herpes, and age 40 years in five minutes. I bring you The Ice Pirates.
Belladonna of Sadness (1973) – Review
To call Belladonna of Sadness a “movie” feels like calling a cathedral a “building.” It’s a hallucination stretched across 93 minutes. It’s what happens when you paint a nightmare in watercolours and then set it on fire. And yet, despite its hypnotic beauty, this is not an easy watch, nor should it be. At its…