Tag Archives: animated

Kanashimi no Beradonna

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I’m again a long time between episodes of my nominally weekly horror podcast, partly due to difficulty finding a copy of the current movie that I could watch, but I think mostly due to being sick for the greater part of a month and falling behind on podcasts in general. I know one of the categories was revenge, but I don’t remember if that was the style or the monster, and I cannot remember what the other category was at all. (One supposes if I could, I’d also know which was which.) But I think revenge must be the monster die. Style could be a lot of things, but this is a 1973 anime named Belladonna of Sadness, so one supposes the style was Asian, or animated films, or not very plausibly 1970s. Just because of the glut of revenge movies from that decade, I mean.

Of course, I could be wrong about any of these facts, aside from what the movie was I mean. I’d check, but I’ve written way too much for that to make sense at this point.

There was a movie, I was saying. If I’m being real, I have no way to usefully talk about this movie without massive spoilers. Here’s what I can say before I reach that line: Belladonna of Sadness is a wildly stylized and yet minimally animated[1] movie about a medieval European, probably French, village in which a very much in love couple gets married, like you do, but then nothing whatsoever goes well for them for the remainder of the flick.

Okay, I’m not going to explain the plot point by point, because for one thing I don’t think I could anyway, but either way, definitely spoilers from here on in. Cut below the footnote.

[1] In the sense that there isn’t a lot of animation. There’s a lot of art, which the camera pans across, and sometimes small pieces of the art move in small ways. And sometimes it goes crazy. But mostly: very minimalist, from an animated perspective.

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Seoulyeok

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According to the write-up, Seoul Station is a prequel to Train to Busan, which would actually have to be more of a sidequel since the first twenty minutes of the latter movie take place during the same day / overnight that all of the former movie occurs during. The zombies are the same style (controlling for live action vs animation at least), and I have no reason to disbelieve them, it just… doesn’t make sense as a prequel instead of its own standalone movie. Partly because they have nothing to do with each other save look at how many more views we’ll get with brand recognition, but mostly because the logistics fall apart. If the Seoul movie had happened as it did, people would have known by early AM not to be getting on trains to Busan.

Whatever, it’s the same writer and director, I guess I have to take his word for it.

Leaving all that aside, though, this is a dark, brutal, and above all angry movie that would definitely fit in any US metropolis as well as it fits in Seoul. See, the zombies are real and all, but they’re also a metaphor for the homeless problem. I say that in the sense that at every opportunity, the citizenry at large and especially anyone in a position of authority continuously portrays the crazy people who are running around biting folks as the homeless gone wild, to the extent that anyone who is still alive but also homeless is considered just as dangerous as the actual zombies are, and always to their detriment.

(There is an actual plot to this movie that I have not even slightly addressed, if the above sounds like spoilers. I mean, it probably still does, but you should know.)

I wonder if anyone in the target audience, such as people who can afford TVs or movie theater excursions, listened to the angry undercurrents. US audiences wouldn’t have, so I can’t really have a lot of faith that it was different somewhere else. But maybe!