A Thousand and One Nights (1969) Sen'ya ichiya monogatari
A Thousand and One Nights (1969)
BDRip 1080p | MKV | 1920x816 | x264 @ 5695 Kbps | 130 min | 6,56 Gb
Audio: Japanese (日本語) DTS 2.0 @ 1509 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded)
Genre: Animation, Action, Adventure, Erotic
BDRip 1080p | MKV | 1920x816 | x264 @ 5695 Kbps | 130 min | 6,56 Gb
Audio: Japanese (日本語) DTS 2.0 @ 1509 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded)
Genre: Animation, Action, Adventure, Erotic
Director: Eiichi Yamamoto
Writers: Kazuo Fukazawa, Hiroyuki Kumai
Stars: Sachiko Itô, Haruko Katô, Noboru Mitani
Aldin, a poor traveling water seller rescues a beautiful slave woman named Miriam from a slave auction in Baghdad. They fall in love at first sight and have a tryst, but the evil sheriff arrests Aldin and takes Miriam for himself. After being tortured, Aldin eventually manages to escape only to find his beloved dying in childbirth. Aldin flees the city and has many more bizarre, dangerous and often tragic adventures including finding Ali Baba's cave of wonders where he meets a tomboy outlaw with a serious grudge against the sheriff, landing on a strange island full of beautiful horny naked women, escaping a gigantic man-eating monster and discovering a ship that's actually a wish-granting genie. Eventually, Aldin returns to Baghdad as a much older and bitter man with the intent of becoming the new king and marrying the princess, who may or may not be his illegitimate daughter. However, nothing goes as planned despite the intervention of two quizzical shapeshifting creatures.
This movie is completely wacky. Completely. Wacky. It concerns the story of a poor water seller in Baghdad who stumbles his way through ali baba and his 40 thieves, the tower of Babel, sinbad the sailor, the island of the sirens and many others stories that either i didn't recognise from the 1001 nights stories or were just made up by the animation team on one of what must have been many acid binges. The film was made in 1969 with a crew of about 15 animators and others (the same names pop up in multiple roles) and is thus forced to employ a number of techniques to cheapen the animation, using still frames incorporating live action shots (for such hard to animate things as the ocean) and shooting live action footage of miniature models for the landscape shots. Despite this there is a great deal of skill in the animation, especially in the number of things the morph into other things. Some scenes in this film are intensely erotic blending abstract and direct representations of sex scenes and orgies. The abstract sex scenes was some of the weirdest animation i've ever scene, essentially an undulating mass of pink springing forth the occasional phallus or feminine curve. It is interesting that although this movie does not conform to the styles and convention of Japanese anime there is visible in some characters prototypes of what would become staple anime genre identities. The mecha/ monster, the naive Kawaii girl, the gritty needs-no-man woman. However all in all this film is totally totally one hundred percent wacky. If a festival near you has got its hands on the only surviving print in the world, take advantage of the opportunity, go see it and take a tape recorder in with you and record the soundtrack, some classic psychedelic sixties music is attached to this movie.
(click to enlarge)
A Thousand and One Nights (1969) Sen'ya ichiya monogatari
More in My Blog