A dream-like version of the Sabbath in the Middle Ages: one night at full moon, the women leave home to meet with the devil in the woods. Several orgiastic ceremonies later, they all return home at cockcrow. All except for one, the youngest, who is under an evil spell.
Category: Animation
The scene is a pre-French Revolution Bastille, where various political prisoners are being held: a woman who was raped and impregnated by the king, a police chief who was accused of selling bad pork, and the Marquis, who was unjustly accused of working for the overthrow of the king. The Marquis is only interested in writing his deviant stories, while his penis yearns for a little action (they argue about this frequently), the prime candidate being the jailer who likes to be buggered. The corrupt priest arranges to have the pregnant woman raped by the Marquis so they can claim the king had nothing to do with it. The priest also steals the Marquis’ manuscripts and publishes them for his own profit. Things come to a head as the people rise up against the tyranny.
Very hard radiography of repression, torture and the unstoppable desire to achieve freedom. The untold protest drawn by OPS, with a mouth that screams in a face that has literally sewn other parts, becomes one of the most political and adult works of Spanish animation.
This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass–the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, Stingiest stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq.
In a mainframe, a series of punch cards are used to process data. One punch hole is bored. It decides to harass some of the other holes hoping that it would be more exciting. Can the other holes keep him in check?
Author/illustrator Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja bugei-cho was a popular graphic novel serialized across Japan in the 1960s, well loved by students and leftist radicals for its tale of a young boy’s alliance with a band of ninja during a peasant uprising. Nagisa Oshima takes an experimental approach to adaptation; out of deep respect for Shirato’s artistry (and his usual cinematic prankishness), he films Shirato’s images as they appear on the page, like an anime version of Sans soleil, with the camera hovering and darting over each “scene” to provide movement and life. Adding voices, sound effects, and a narration that connects the plot’s myriad strands, Oshima intervenes in yet another unexpected genre to create a fascinating treatise on cinema, narrative, and action.
This black-and-white cartoon captures the last few moments of a prisoner arriving at the place of execution before the weapons roll. The darkness before death is preceded by the darkness of a blindfold that allows only two bands of light into the world. This is the last time the prisoner can see the nose of his shoes on the pavement.