SENYA ICHIYA MONOGATARI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MOVIE DramaKanashimi no Belladonna
MOVIE ComedyCleopatra

REVIEWS

• 

  Whom

  60/100
  And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually...

  Gotta love psychedelic shit from this era. With artists of all kinds trying to push their work to be as ambitious and forward-thinking as possible, fusing influences from wherever they could be found and creating grand works like this...it feels like they were onto something we never quite cracked. Like they knew the direction we had to go to create the ultimate art, but they could never quite do it. They were reaching for god and got SO close...it's a feeling that's infinitely interesting for me but that I have to take a step away from and just revisit now and then. It's easy to get stuck in thinking of that as the highest achievement of art in general and with that we limit our own creativity, our tastes, and risk making the same mistakes that those involved in it did. We shouldn't be free love druggie hippies hoping to make change by freeing our minds and reaching god through the sex and drugs, but we sure as hell can learn from and appreciate what the art born of all that ended up being.

  That whole spirit is in this film, it's clearly aligned with everything else going on in the late 60s that had already started to crash and burn in the west. It captures you for that reason, if you have a taste for that. There's beautiful minatures and live action footage mixed with traditional animation in a charmingly rough fashion that reminds me more of when Spongebob did that than the more successful examples of those techniques, but it still works to its benefit. If I'm honest, though I've seen Arabian Nights and the stories lumped in with it adapted in a million different forms and I have some distant experience with some version of the original stories...I have a very hard time telling what is from that and what is original. Nevertheless, there's a lot of misogyny and...oddities in here that you can ignore at first when the full psychedelic wave is hitting you but quickly get to be grating as you come down.

  The only reason I don't rate this significantly higher is that it loses its edge fairly quickly and eventually is just a disjointed telling of these stories that's not really all that exciting. The bits at the beginning when it's truly losing its mind are where the value of the thing are in focus, it would actually work much better as a music-driven deep psych dive with sexual imagery all over the place. It sags, and that's unfortunate, but it's still absolutely worth a watch for the moments where it really shines.

  Let me do my own scoring system for reviews, cowards.

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• 

  KlNO

  80/100
  The ambitious love-child of several eras and cultures. It did not stand the test of time, still, an experience to have.

  I once started reading The Mahabharata, which is like... 13 000 pages long and several hundred of those were what ppl would consider "the prologue of a prologue". So I must say, when I see this mf (One Thousand and One Nights) adapted into a barely longer than 2h movie, there's no wonder the plot feels a bit... rushed.

  

  All that aside, my 10th anime from the 60s (challenge completed, sorry cAstro Boy, it never would've worked out between us) turned out to be quite the experience. I suppose you can't have ~ 12 centuries-old erotic stories without some misogyny, but I've seen worse and let's not judge it by XXIst century standards. Let's judge it by the standard of the time it was adapted in. And holy sh*t, that was the extasy-filled, hippy-dippy make love not war wave of the 60s!

  What a trip this turned out to be! The animation is not just experimental, it's also decent. Like it came out the same year as the original Dororo and while that's my oldest favourite to this day, you can tell that was more concerned about telling an epic story with dark tones in black and white, than to compete with animated productions on an international playing field. This was a much more ambitious project, partially because of the foreign source material, partially because it also appeals to western audiences, and partially because of all the sex and nudity that people always had mixed feelings about being shown on the screen. The animation is inventive, it's expressive, it pulsates with life, which works wonders with the heavily psychedelic OST. Seriously, if you want to experience basic psychedelic music from those times, you barely need more than this (although some Pink Floyd and the Aphrodite's Child - 666 album are still highly recommended).

  I'm not calling it the great grandmother that made Araragi-kun's harem so popular and those blessed butt-shaped mousepads possible, but it certainly was a gear in the ecchi/hentai locomotive that still makes its wonderful circles in our lives and I think I've even heard Maetel's VA from Galaxy Express 999 in the anime, but who knows, almost every Japanese female VA sounded the same back then (shuddup, you know it's true). We know Disney treats its source materials like our neighbour treats the Bible, so no surprises that the orgies didn't make the cut for Aladdin or that this is an entirely different story with only familiar elements shared, in any case... I'm not sure how faithful of an adaptation this was, maybe the original had its own Goldie Pond arc, but as I already wrote it, the movie version felt quite abridged. That aside, it was lot more eventful than a later part of the objectifying women on LSD trilogy: Belladonna of Sadness and it's undeniably a cult classic, like several other psychedelic films from the era (khhmm El Topo).

  If you get the hang of it, it's a majestic adventure, a "trip"; exciting at first, but you don't invest much in the characters and halfway through you start checking the remaining length, probably because these tales, or "episodes" would work better separately, especially because they don't build up to much character development or satisfying conclusion altogether on a grand scale, and those are usually valued for a reason. It probably even reflects a bit on how seeking the limits of excitement and pleasure results in an inevitable burnout, without it being the intention, so I'm not planning a rewatch any time soon, but I'm glad I saw it, because they don't make works like this anymore.

  8/10

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