, also known as "The Tragedy of Belladonna", is a 1973
feature filmIn the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...
produced by the Japanese
animation studioAn animation studio is a company producing animated media. The broadest such companies conceive of products to produce, own the physical equipment for production, employ operators for that equipment, and hold a major stake in the sales or rentals of the media produced...
Mushi ProductionMushi Production , or Mushi Pro for short, is a Japanese animation studio headquartered in Nerima, Tokyo, Japan....
and distributor Nippon Herald Films. Directed and co-written by
Eiichi YamamotoEiichi Yamamoto is a Japanese film director and screenwriter of Anime. He directed ten films between 1962 and 1986. His 1973 film Kanashimi no Belladonna was entered into the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival....
and inspired by
Jules MicheletJules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...
's
non-fictionNon-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
book
Satanism and WitchcraftSatanism And Witchcraft is a book by Jules Michelet on the history of witchcraft, published, originally in French, in 1862. The first English translation was published in London in 1863. According to Michelet, medieval witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism...
, it is the third and final film in the
Animeramais a series of thematically-related adult anime feature films originally conceived and initiated by Osamu Tezuka and made at his Mushi Production animation studio from the late 1960s to early 1970s, perhaps intended as animated counterparts to the then-emergent pink films .As well as the erotic...
trilogy and the only one to be neither written nor directed by
Osamu Tezukawas a Japanese cartoonist, manga artist, animator, producer, activist and medical doctor, although he never practiced medicine. Born in Osaka Prefecture, he is best known as the creator of Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Black Jack...
(he left Mushi Production during the film's early stages to concentrate on his
comicsManga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
and his conceptual-stage contribution is uncredited).