Cleopatra

Cleopatra is a wild ride. Just looking at the cover and reading the synopsis will not prepare you even for a fraction of what happens in this movie and while overall it’s drawn out mess there’s enough crazy in this to warrant a watch.

First things first, when it comes to story Cleopatra is a rather dull, stretched out, vaguely historical retelling of Cleopatra’s life that mixes historical accounts with some legends and its own original scenes. For some reason this is all wrapped in the premise of people way far in the future going to the past cause they overheard aliens talking about a plan ... that has Cleopatra’s name in it.

Either way none of this would be worth talking about as something bad after all there’s nothing inherently wrong with alternative history plots that stray from historical facts for drama. What breaks the story elements of this movie apart is that it can’t find balance between comedy, surreal and arty segments and the drama. When it wants to be funny it is actually hilarious at times and when it goes for the surreal a lot of the time it is beautiful and captivating but when it goes for drama there’s a sharp contrast. Cleopatra most of the time speeds over the moments that would humanize the characters or make you really care or sympathize with them so when it comes to tragedy or joy it’s hard to get those emotions out of the movie, so more likely response is just “so what, when’s this scene gonna end”. The movie lasts just sightly under 2 hours but thanks to all the serious segments it feels like all 3.

Luckily there’s a lot more to this than drama that makes this movie easy to recommend to anyone with passing interest. First of all the comedy is really good a lot of the time. With old shows and movies there’s sometimes a concern about how it aged. What was hilarious 40 or 50 years ago might be puzzling now but Cleopatra is not an example of that. The humor is surprisingly really damn inventive and even if something falls flat the movie never lingers on it and instead offers something different at a steady rate. I couldn’t expect a movie made in 1970 to feel so fresh.

The second and probably bigger attribute of enjoyment is how wild this movie gets with its visuals. That is evident right from the start because for some reason the movie opens up on live action footage with 2D faces drawn over actors and one of first visuals in Egypt you get is a psychedelic montage of romans massacring people in a way that’s simultaneously gruesome and cartoony way. Somewhere closer to the middle there’s a parade in Rome which consists out of pretty damn detailed animations that parody some famous paintings from many different styles. It’s just wild and even though it doesn’t persist throughout the entire movie there’s still a lot here to entertain the eye.

Just in case the hentai tag concerns you, don’t worry, it’s really hard to characterize this movie as erotic despite the story having a lot to do with seduction and sex. Yes there’s boobs, yes there’s sex on the screen but it’s so cartoony and sometimes surreal that it makes Titanic seem like hardcore german porn in comparison.

In short, the story is poorly written and not engaging but the comedy and visuals make up for it. It’s not great but definitely a unique watch.

Cleopatra is a difficult work to talk about and with, because it's essentially a very long and occasionally meaningless sex pervert movie (or, to put it more professionally, an erotic arthouse film) that nonetheless has a lot of historical and artistic interest.
The story and characters both effectively exist only as vessels for the artistic intent that MushiPro wanted to convey, which careens between erotic, comedic, genuinely tragic, and completely abstract. It's a long, long movie with very poor pacing that can be difficult to sit through if you're not in the right mindset, especially since most of the plot is flat and it occasionally ... borders on being an unintelligible excuse for sex scenes that register more as outrageous or experimental rather than actually arousing in any measure.
The best parts of the movie are all in the technical aspects, from its bizarre and bewildering animation- it opens on a camera panning down a cardboard city and has an entire section with human actors that have painted on, animated heads- to its sound design. This movie effectively exists just for the people at MushiPro to do whatever they want with some vague outlines of premise attached to it. The parade of art styles and the Kabuki portrayal of Julius Caesar's death are probably my favorite sections of the film; it also pulls forward with bitingly satirical veiled political references at times, drawing parallels between Rome and the United States, Japan and Egypt.
Unfortunately even though it has a lot of artistic positives, the incredibly slow and tedious pacing along with the nonsense plot combine into a deadly sort of toxin that makes this film inimical to genuine enjoyment. It's very much a product of its era, and I don't think modern anime fans with mainstream sensibilities would get much out of it rather than disgust; even people who enjoy 'animator's anime', where the point is allowing the people at the studio to experiment and have fun rather than create a streamlined product, would probably have difficulty digesting this one- God knows I did.
Objectively, I would recommend this if you're a history nut on a 70s film binge and smoke a lot of weed, and have about three or four friends of that exact ken. It's also worth watching if you're researching MushiPro and Tezuka's career (in which case you've probably already encountered similar themes in his more mature manga). Otherwise, just go look up clips of the more interesting animated parts and you've saved yourself from two hours of drudgery.

Cleopatra is a work which is filled with as much good as it is bad. It is based on the life of Cleopatra, which it paints with very broad strokes. Parts of it are incoherent, especially in the first half, while others are genuinely good historical fiction. The opening scene, which mixes live-action and animation, is the worst thing I have ever seen. It was directed by both Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto, and you can see the signature of both of them here. It has Tezuka's trademark humor, which mostly is just inappropriate and jarring here. It's strange to see Tezuka's typical over-the-top slapstick ... style used in the service of a rape joke. The first half of the movie in generally is often tasteless. There is also an entirely unnecessary science fiction subplot that can be removed without losing anything. When it gets serious and emotional, however, its actually worth watching. Some of the best parts are those which evoke the later psychedelic scenes of Belladona of Sadness. There's something in the idea that this movie would have been better without Tezuka directing. Overall, Cleopatra is a very uneven movie, with as much good as bad. I wish I could be the first positive review, but considering the admixture of plenty of flaws into the film, it doesn't really deserve one.

To be honest, I liked it. Would I watch it again? No, it's a movie to watch just once, remember it, whether in a bad or good way and leave it there, forgotten. The animation's art style, at least for me, is what kept me watching, even though I fell asleep around half the movie and had to watch it again from that part on, that's another thing, it feels really long, specially in some parts around the start and the end. Let's say it's an experience, and you should watch it when you had slept well and around 5 to 6 pm.