A group of teenagers are having sex with a girl of about the same age. What sounds like any sequence from an 80s erotic film looks completely different in Hideki Takayama’s Urotsukidoji – Legend of the Overfiend.
Because the adolescent counterpart in the comedy is not a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, nor a non-binary person, no, not even a human being. Instead she prefers to have fun with a strange tentacle monsterwhich wraps itself lustfully around her body. Welcome to the world of Urotsukidoji!
Godzilla meets Dragonball, American Pie and Oh yodel me one more: The plot of Urotsukidoji
The film tells the story of the old legend of the god-like Chojin. This is supposed to be reborn every 3000 years and unite our world with that of the human beasts and demons in order to create a kingdom of harmony.
Since he is stuck in the body of a Tokyo teenager for the time being, in addition to Kaiju-like giant monsters and anime-typical light beam duels (keyword Kamehame Ha), the film also contains things that are mostly familiar from high school films: nerds, bullies, the first great love, the first sexual experiences and chronic horniness of all characters – although in the case of Urotsukidoji this really applies to ALL characters, regardless of whether they are human or not.
That the film is still considered today “The most famous and disreputable adult anime of all time” (Quote Dropout Cinema) is advertised has an indirect connection with Japanese censorship.
Thanks to censorship, tentacles play a special role
This prohibited the creator of the template, mangaka Toshio Maeda, who still specializes in erotic and pornographic works, from drawing male genitals. So he came up with the idea of painting tentacles instead of penises (via Glamour). Regardless of whether consciously or unconsciously, Maeda became one of them most famous representatives of contemporary tentacle erotica – a pornographic sub-genre that contains sex and tentacles in some form.
Check out the trailer here:
Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend – Trailer (German) HD
The origins of the genre go back to Katsushika Hokusai’s picture The Fisherman’s Wife’s Dream from 1814, as can be read at Celebrate Hentai. Although this very special form of bizarre eroticism alone was reason enough to offend, it was probably not enough for director Takayama. So he enriched Maeda’s origin story with a large amount of sex, violence and rape scenes. In the anime, the demons peel off their human costumes in a particularly bloody way, intestines fall to the ground with a loud splash, and young women and teenage girls are repeatedly penetrated by several tentacles at the same time.
In Japan, where there is a long tradition of mixing the erotic, pornographic and grotesque, such images are of course perceived differently than outside the land of the rising sun. There is also a certain form of homoeroticism in the film, for example when a male teenager licks up another’s sperm. And with the human beast Megumi Amano, a sexually self-confident and assertive female character appears. That’s worth mentioning, though. Nonetheless Urotsukidoji is full of rape fantasies and objectifications of young women and teenage girls. Every viewer has to decide for themselves what and how to think about it.
This could also be interesting:
The controversial anime is in a league of its own. Urotsukidoji is something like the obscene underworld version of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, in which sex, violence and fantasy tentacles embrace crude horror, an epic love tragedy and Japanese pop: an evil satire and parody of the hellish horrors of sexual adolescence
This quote from Moviepilot user dear_tee sums it up very well: Urotsukidoji plays in a league of its own. This also means that the film, for all its depravity, is also one incredibly fascinating story toldhas likeable characters that we quickly grow fond of and an animation style that is still groundbreaking today. All of these are elements typical of the “Golden Age of Anime”. Back then, budgets were still large and no idea was too far-fetched.
Even anime laypeople know the anime from this era: e.g. Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Akira, Ghost in the Shell. Urotsukidoji can join this list without a guilty conscience as the dark, sparkling anime gem that it is.
You can see the film here: