Midori - The Girl in the Freak Show - 1992 - Hiroshi Harada

Released in 1992
Directed by  Hiroshi Harada

Storieline - Shôjo tsubaki - Chika gentô gekiga is a very disturbing story about a young girl called Midori who ends up in a circus, practically as a slave. At first, with no protection, she is doing all the hard work for everyone else, and gets raped and molested by freaks. After a while a magician Masanitsu joins the circus and makes it profitable again which gains him influence. He takes Midori under his care and treats her nice, but that arises jealousy among other members so Midoris troubles are far from over.

Shōjo Tsubaki ("The Camellia Girl") was a stock protagonist of kamishibai during its revival in early Shōwa period Japan attributed to a creator known as Seiun, though the plagiarism and retelling in sundry variants that was the norm for popular-proving tales make its origin uncertain. Generally speaking, the character is a stereotypical adolescent or preadolescent ingénue, a daughter of a penniless family who goes from the frying pan of selling camellias on the streets to the fire of being bought and sold and forced to perform in a revue show.

Midori is a 1992 Japanese independent ero guro film by Hiroshi Harada, based on Suehiro Maruo's comic version of the kamishibai standard. The film, which Harada scripted and directed under the pseudonym of Hisaaki and whom he presents as a lost filmmaker he worked on it under, consists primarily of paintings and cels of drawings by Harada held, panned or zoomed over with music, sound effects and voice acting and occasional touches of traditional animation.

The character is known to western, and indeed contemporary Japanese, audiences predominantly by way of Suehiro Maruo's ero guro reinterpretation in comics including a graphic novel of the same name published in English translation as Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show and Hiroshi Harada's film based on Maruo's version.

See Suehiro Maruo's ero guro comic book Here

Take 5 years to animate the entire movie, the movie was ‘performed’ as an underground freak show, where people were given maps, giving them directions through a maze of eerie fogs, where one would arrive at an atmospheric screening room.

The film was single handedly created by Hiroshi Harada. Given the subject matter, Harada had found it impossible to gain sponsors. He then used all of his life savings to make the film over a five-year period. Over 5000 separate sheets of animation were hand drawn by Harada.

The film is considered partially lost, it was banned on account of depicting imagery illegal to in Japan at the time and seized, with some sequences surviving only in standard definition from telecining prior.

For many years very rare to see at all as Harada will only screen Midori in Japan if the venue is presented as a carnival freak show, the original film has been destroyed and only a handful of bootleg video copies were known to exist.

Size 699.55 MiB - avi - Download Torrent