It’s Unstreamable! Where Jas Keimig and Chase Burns recommend movies and TV shows you can't watch on major streaming services in the United States. We post on Wednesdays unless we’re tired or busy 😊
🚨BIG NEWS!!! 🚨
Another IRL Unstreamable screening is coming to the Northwest Film Forum. During the first weekend of September, we’ll present Rintarô’s early millennium masterpiece, Metropolis, an ambitious riff on Fritz Lang’s influential 1927 film of the same name. Read more about the movie below and reserve your seat HERE. Know a cute nerd coming into town for PAX West 2023 or Nintendo Live that weekend? Reserve them a seat, too. Make it a date.
🚨AND ONE MORE THING!!! 🚨
To prep for our Metropolis screening, we’re doing ALL ANIME ALL MONTH for the column. Catch us in the Anime room at Scarecrow! Got a recommendation? Give us the scoop at unstreamablemovies@gmail.com.
Japan, 2001, 113 minutes, Dir. Rintarô
A young detective and a mysterious robot girl explore every layer of a bustling, high-tech city called Metropolis, uncovering its dark secrets of exploitation and artificial intelligence. Loosely inspired by the German silent film, Metropolis is an epic that pulsates with neon-lit nostalgia and sets reminiscent of Blade Runner. Originally written as a manga in the late 1940s by the “God of manga” Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy), Japanese animation studio Madhouse hired director Rintaro (Galaxy Express 999) and writer Katsuhiro Ôtomo (Akira) to build this ambitious film in partnership with Tezuka Productions. It’s a movie that deserves to be as well-known as other Madhouse classics like Perfect Blue and Paprika.
Metropolis took five years to create and cost around $9 million, making it the most expensive anime ever when it premiered, passing Akira’s budget. Audiences loved it when it debuted, with Roger Ebert calling it one of the best animated films he’d ever seen. But likely due to a licensing issue with the use of Ray Charles’s song “I Can’t Stop Loving You” on the film’s New Orleans-style soundtrack, it’s long been unstreamable in the US. We’re proud to present it on a big screen this September, during PAX West 2023 and Nintendo Live weekend, in both subbed and dubbed versions.
Find it in the Animation Room in the Anime/Manga section.
Japan, 1969, 128 minutes, Dir. Eiichi Yamamoto
Continuing with our anime theme this month, let’s look at two lesser-known films from Osamu Tezuka, both distributed by Third Window Films in the UK.
People love Belladonna of Sadness, that streamable, trippy, rape-filled anime that made headlines when it toured the world in 2016. That film is the third film in the X-rated Animerama Trilogy, and it tends to blot out the two that preceded it. That's understandable—Belladonna of Sadness is singular—but the first two are also good. I imagine many people encounter the trilogy backward, like I did, starting with Belladonna, then reaching the second, Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, and then ending at the beginning, A Thousand and One Nights. The films build on each other, especially stylistically, so if I could do it all over, I'd start here and end with Belladonna.
A Thousand and One Nights is set in Baghdad, focusing on a poor water seller as he becomes a rich man and then a king and then a poor man again, all while getting laid. Often. Like its successors, this film is gorgeous, if not a little less so. It's acidic, strange, experimental, and, I guess, X-rated—although not quite X-rated enough. But I have to mention the pink panther pussy. I'm not sure what was going on with these guys who made this, but… I was not ready for that horny panther. Or its boobs, thighs, crotch...
Find it in the Animation Room in the Anime/Manga section.
Japan, 1970, 112 min, Dir. Osamu Tezuka, Eiichi Yamamoto
Continuing digging into this very adult work from Tezuka, the "Walt Disney of Japan,” is another "X-rated" animated film that flopped hard when it came to America. I use "X-rated" in scare quotes because Cleopatra, Queen of Sex isn't quite X-rated enough. Billed with a self-applied X-rating, the film never asked for a rating in fear of getting an R. There is, of course, lots of sex. Weird sex. Loud sex. Most of it very problematic sex. Though it remains artful. But the reason it failed is that American audiences allegedly didn't find it pornographic enough. Still, it's chaotic and wild and, like most things distributed by Third Window Films, a forgotten gem that deserves a second look.
Find it in the Animation Room in the Anime/Manga section.
Looking for more? Browse our big list of 350+ hard-to-find movies over on The Stranger.
*The fine print: Unstreamable means we couldn’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Disney+, or any of the other hundreds of streaming services available in the United States. We also couldn’t find it available for rent or purchase through platforms like Prime Video or iTunes. Yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don’t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.
