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 core, Belladonna is a story of sexual violence, exploitation, and the dark, seductive power of rebellion. It is not just provocative, it is pain rendered in motion.
Directed by Eiichi Yamamoto and produced by Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Production (yes, that Osamu Tezuka — the father of Astro Boy — proving again that the ‘70s were weird for everyone), Belladonna of Sadness was the final instalment in the “Animerama” trilogy, and by far the most radical. Where the previous two films, A Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra, wove eroticism with slapstick and psychedelia, Belladonna of Sadness discards almost all levity. This film is not fun. It’s art, in the most dangerous, devastating sense.
Love will not conquer all.
At first glance, it’s a simple story, based on Jules Michelet’s 1862 novel, “La Sorcière.” Its plot is rooted in medieval injustice, but rendered mythic, brutal, and strange. Jeanne (Aiko Nagayama), a luminous peasant girl, marries Jean (Katsutaka Ito), a gentle but passive farmer. Their love is real, their happiness brief. On their wedding night, the local baron (Masaya Takahashi), drunk on his own divine right, invokes droit du seigneur and has Jeanne raped by his court. The violence unfolds not with realism, but as a swirling, stylized nightmare, her pain abstracted into jagged lines, bleeding colours, and haunting symbolism.
It’s beautiful, and it’s awful.
Jean retreats into silence, clinging to a past already lost, helpless and ashamed, eventually abandoning Jeanne. This is when something inside her breaks — or hardens — and a flicker of resistance takes hold. She begins seeing (or summoning) a small devil (Tatsuya Nakadai), a seductive trickster who offers power, not comfort. Whether he’s real or imagined, he becomes the catalyst. Jeanne begins to resist…quietly, then with resolve. She sheds the roles forced upon her, defies the church and lord, and becomes something more: a healer, a merchant, a force. Jean, once her partner, now watches her from the margins, with awe and fear.
“Who says anger and hate are ugly?”
As suffering spreads, war, famine, plague, the people turn to Jeanne. She heals, comforts, seduces, and refuses to apologize. Her power comes not from sorcery, but from knowledge, autonomy, and will. That is enough to make her dangerous. She becomes a witch not by spellwork, but by definition: a woman beyond control. She becomes a legend, not by claiming authority, but by embodying defiance. Her strength, her sexuality, and her refusal to disappear make her myth.
Herein lies the power of beauty and sexuality.
The world does what it always does to women who won’t kneel: Jeanne is branded a witch — not for curses, but for living freely. Her healing is heresy, her independence a threat, and she is burned to be erased. But the flames fail. Her body turns to ash, yet a presence endures, a name, a whisper, a spark that won’t die. Belladonna of Sadness is no triumph, no revenge fantasy. It’s a tragedy where even power corrupts or consumes. By the end, Jeanne is less woman than myth, rage, desire, disease, all the fears men projected onto her. And in death, she becomes more powerful than ever, her spirit carried forward in every act of defiance, a fire waiting to ignite.
“Vive la Résistance”
What makes Belladonna so arresting—besides its raw thematic ambition—is the animation itself. Or, more accurately, its refusal to animate in the traditional sense. Entire scenes unfold like illustrated storybooks: slow pans across still images, whispered narration, a score that shifts from baroque to psychedelic. It’s less a film than an incantation. At times, it feels like time itself has stopped, and you’re trapped inside a cursed manuscript, gilded, grotesque, and whispering secrets you shouldn’t know.
Be wary if that whispering is from a little penis-sized devil.
Visually, this thing should not exist. It’s mostly still images, languid, delicate, unnervingly still — punctuated by eruptions of animated chaos. It moves like a storybook caught in a fever dream. The watercolour aesthetic recalls European illuminated manuscripts and Art Nouveau posters, but infected with erotic decay. Think Egon Schiele meets tarot deck meets prog rock album cover. Some of the transitions are jaw-dropping; a single line of narration will trigger a visual montage of such audacity it feels like cinema itself is convulsing. Jeanne’s rape scene, for example, is rendered not through lurid realism but as a kaleidoscopic barrage of limbs, flowers, and tears. It doesn’t soften the violence; if anything, it amplifies the horror by refusing to let you look away.
There is no safe emotional distance.
Let’s be clear: Belladonna of Sadness is drenched in sex. Nudity, moaning, orgies, phallic symbols by the dozen. But it’s not sexy. It’s disorienting, confrontational, and often disturbing. The eroticism here is not celebratory…it’s weaponized. Jeanne’s body becomes a battlefield. Her sexuality is used against her, then reclaimed, then used again. The line between empowerment and damnation blurs until it evaporates completely. There’s thematic weight here, buried beneath the psychedelia: that female autonomy, in a patriarchal structure, is often branded as witchcraft. That society fears women who refuse to be destroyed. Jeanne is punished for surviving, not for vengeance, not for witchery, but for daring to endure.
A truly dark and evil society.
This is where Belladonna tips from tragedy into something mythic. Jeanne becomes a symbol not just of individual defiance but of collective memory, the spirit that would someday echo in revolution. The final moments leap through time, hinting at Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, and the women’s liberation movement. Jeanne doesn’t just die. She spreads. But again, this isn’t triumph. It’s the cold comfort of legacy. Jeanne’s “win” is posthumous, symbolic, and bittersweet. She was not allowed to live. And the film does not pretend otherwise.
A powerful and poignant film.
In conclusion, Belladonna of Sadness is not a film for everyone. It’s slow, it’s abstract, and it doesn’t provide easy catharsis. But it’s a masterpiece of expressionistic animation—a feminist horror-opera wrapped in medieval parchment and lit with matchstick fire. It feels like it was exhumed from a forgotten crypt, and maybe it was better off there. But now that it’s here, we should listen. Carefully. Because Belladonna doesn’t ask to be liked. It demands to be witnessed.
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