animation-appreciation-education:千夜一夜物語 / Senya Ichiya MonogatariA Thousand and One Nights 15
animation-appreciation-education: 千夜一夜物語 / Senya Ichiya MonogatariA Thousand and One Nights 152 in x of animated feature film historyRelease: Jun. 14th, 1968Country: JapanDirector: Eiichi Yamamoto This film features nudity, sexual content, and a brief depiction of rape. Aladdin (or Aldin), a poor traveling water seller, falls in love with Miriam, a slave girl on auction in Baghdad; when she’s sold to the police chief’s spoiled son, Aladdin steals her, and the pair are imprisoned in a wealthy man’s mansion. When the man is killed, Aladdin is blamed and sent to prison. Meanwhile, Miriam gives birth to a daughter––Jalis––and dies. Escaping jail, Aladdin goes on a series of adventures for 15 years, eventually returning to Baghdad as the rich sailor Sinbad. He becomes king, but loses favor after commanding his citizens to build a tower to heaven. He also falls in love with Jalis, not knowing she is his daughter, and attempts to force her to join his harem. When his true identity as Aladdin is revealed, he is sentenced to death, but escapes to the desert and again becomes a poor water seller. “Prior to this film, animator Osamu Tezuka had made films aimed primarily at children. Tezuka wanted to show that animation could be for all age groups and all interests. In the late 1960s, he decided to produce features for adults that were erotic, but in good taste. Using the full resources of his animation studio, Mushi Production, the staff was said to reach a gigantic 60,000 people, including art director Osamu Dezaki ad character designer Takashi Yanase. The story, developed by Tezuka with credited assistance by Kazuo Fukasaka and Hiroyuki Kumai, was a loose hodgepodge of some of the A Thousand and One Nights (a series of Middle Eastern folktales assembled between the 8th and 14th centuries) as translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton kept the adult sexuality and obscenity of the original, and so did Tezuka’s version––though with his own updates and experimentalism. A Thousand and One Nights was a critical success in Japan as an imaginative and experimental film. It featured an intelligent adult story with psychedelic rock music. The often stylized and abstract animation was combined with occasional brief live-action footage. However, it was largely ignored outside of Japan; The reputation of animation as ‘just for kids’ was too strong. Distributors in other countries who admired it did not see how it could be successfully marketed. Tezuka’s faithfulness to the original tales was seen as more of a flaw than something to be admired. The film was also not well received in the Middle East because of its nudity and eroticism, as well as the way in which the main character was portrayed, such as eating pork and drinking wine despite being Muslim. The film predates the more successful release of Fritz the Cat, the first American X-rated animated film, by three years.” (source)(source) POSTED: 1/03/19 -- source link
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