A Thousand and One Nights (1969) – Review

 

When most people hear the name Osamu Tezuka, they think of wide-eyed robots (Astro Boy), jungle adventures (Kimba the White Lion), or whimsical medical dramas (Black Jack). But in 1969, Tezuka — the so-called “God of Manga” — shocked audiences with something very different: a psychedelic, erotic, and adult-oriented animated film called A Thousand and One Nights.

As the inaugural film in his experimental Animerama trilogy (followed by 1970’s Cleopatra and 1973’s Belladonna of Sadness), this feature stands at a strange crossroads, somewhere between art film, erotic fantasy, social satire, and cultural collage. Boldly adult in theme and experimental in form, it was a declaration that animation could be more than children’s entertainment, and a chaotic fever dream that still defies easy categorization.

A Thousand Nights of Liberation… and Male Fantasy.

The film is very loosely based on the classic Arabian Nights tales, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting that. It follows Aldin (Yukio Aoshima), a humble water seller with big dreams and even bigger libido. He falls head over heels for Miriam (Kyouko Kishida), a gorgeous slave girl up for auction in Baghdad, because this is that kind of story. Before the corrupt cops can take her away, a sandstorm hits, Aldin plays hero, and they shack up in a creepy mansion. Just as things are heating up, they’re caught mid-coitus by the voyeuristic mansion owner Shalieman (Minoru Uchida), who locks them in and demands an encore. It all ends with murder, a wrongful imprisonment, torture, Aldin’s faked death and escape, and Miriam tragically dying in childbirth, because Tezuka loves his Shakespearean tragedy with a side of cartoon nudity.

See, it’s not just Disney that kills off a parent.

But what led to their imprisonment? In another, equally unhinged subplot, Inspector Badli (Hiroshi Akutagawa), a greasy henchman with zero chill, was hired by Baghdad’s Chief of Police (Hitoshi Takagi) to kill Shalieman, steal his treasure, and bring back Aldin and Miriam in chains. But before that, he rapes Madia (Sachiko Itou), the sword-swinging daughter of the leader of the Forty Thieves, whom he had hired to help pull off the robbery and abductions. Madia vows revenge while the film tries (and fails) to keep its tone consistent. Aldin, having escaped from prison, finds Badli in the desert, has a stabby moral dilemma, and decides to let him go, for reasons. Then he stumbles upon the thieves’ treasure cave, meets Madia, and somehow convinces her to ditch the revenge arc and go sightseeing with him on a flying wooden horse. As one does.

“I thought we’d be using a flying carpet.”

Their romantic vacation doesn’t last long; they’re dragged underwater by magical hair (yes, really) and deposited on Lotus Island, home to snake-women sirens and their queen Lamia (Takako Andō), who seduces Aldin like a jazz-age vampire. Madia takes off on the magic horse, leaving Aldin to enjoy a full buffet of forbidden fruits before realizing—surprise!—Lamia and her ladies are all monstrous snake demons. He barely escapes, only to be picked up by sailors, eaten by a giant, and rescued by a talking magic ship that grants wishes and probably has better character development than half the cast.

“You’ve got a friend in me.”

Fast-forward 15 years: Aldin, now rich and spiritually bankrupt and going by the name Sinbad, wins a king-making contest in Baghdad by marooning his opponent on his magic yacht. He sets his sights on a beautiful girl named Jalis (Kyouko Kishida), who turns out to be Miriam’s daughter—awkward—but she is in love with a shepherd named Aslan (Isao Hashizume), who may or may not be dating a genie-horse. Aldin builds a giant tower to heaven out of sheer ego until the people, fuelled by the ever-manipulating Badli, revolt. Realizing he’s bad at kingship and possibly life in general, Aldin abdicates and rides off into the sunset as a poor man once more, older, wiser, and hopefully done with magic horses.

So, a happy ending?

As one can tell, this isn’t a tightly plotted fairy tale — it’s more like Barbarella meets The Arabian Nights, animated on acid. The film treats the original source material as a launchpad for an entirely new genre: the sex-fantasy epic. But for all its eroticism, this isn’t softcore smut, well, not exactly. The sex is symbolic, expressionist, sometimes exploitative, but often daringly artistic. Women are frequently idealized (and objectified), yes, but they also represent freedom, transformation, and rebellion. The film is caught between progressive impulses and the very male gaze it indulges.

Why Madia runs around with one breast exposed is beyond me.

The animation is a visual fever dream; bold, erratic, and constantly shifting styles like a restless painter experimenting on every frame. Rather than follow a consistent aesthetic, the film embraces chaos as a design principle: one scene bursts with bawdy, cartoonish slapstick, the next slips into painterly melancholy, and another spirals into abstract psychedelia. It’s less a traditional narrative than a kaleidoscopic jazz solo in motion—fluid, unpredictable, and deeply expressive. These shifting styles are anchored by Isao Tomita’s groundbreaking score, which fuses Arabic motifs with space-age Moog and rock textures—perfectly mirroring the film’s fusion of ancient story and modern sensibility.

Who knew that the Tower of Babel was in Baghdad? 

Though it broke ground as the first Japanese “X-rated” animated film, A Thousand and One Nights is more than a skin flick. It is, in many ways, a commentary on colonialism, class, and liberation, all filtered through the prism of male libido. Aldin’s rise and fall is a tale of consumerism and desire; he buys slaves, climbs political ladders, and tries to turn love into possession. But his attempts to control women — particularly Miriam — are always punished. In the end, the film seems to argue, freedom cannot be bought, and love cannot be owned. There’s an undercurrent of sorrow beneath the surrealism, a kind of erotic existentialism that recalls Fellini, Pasolini, or even Kubrick’s later Eyes Wide Shut.

Things tend to get weird and rapey.

This leads to the film’s biggest critique. Its portrayal of women swings between reverence and objectification; they’re often presented as divine, sensual, and mysterious, yet ultimately exist to serve male desire. Miriam, the central love interest, is more symbol than character, defined by what she represents to Aldin rather than any inner agency. Other women are either temptresses or tragic beauties, their sexuality filtered entirely through a male gaze.

One male fantasy after another.

While the film champions sexual liberation, it does so largely through a male lens. Erotic freedom is empowering when it benefits the male protagonist, but for the women, it more often results in loss, objectification, or being treated like a prize. In this, the film reflects the paradoxes of the 1960s sexual revolution, bold and forward-thinking on the surface, yet still tethered to old patriarchal ideas. And then there are the two genies: mischievous little shape-shifters whose idea of experimenting with sex is turning into various animals, more cartoonish than liberating, but certainly on-brand for the film’s surreal tone.

It’s as if the Great Gazoo were a horny lech.

In conclusion, A Thousand and One Nights is a messy, brilliant, deeply flawed masterpiece, overflowing with imagination, excess, and ideas that even today feel ahead of their time. It dares to ask: What happens when you let an animator’s id run wild? What does animation look like when it’s not bound by censors, demographics, or expectations? Apparently, it looks like A Thousand and One Nights — a dream that’s part erotic poem, part acid trip, part morality tale, and all Tezuka.