It is a curious Japanese animated movie. The script is a mess but has funny and smart moments. Animation itself is mostly rough, but the film changes many times the animation style (either mixing real footage with animation, or with minimalist drawing, or without the black line, and so forth) in a sophisticated way. The story happens mostly in classic Cleopatra's arch in Egypt and Rome, but there is also an odd time-trip sci-fi story where it was bizarrely inserted. It is widely known as an erotic animated film but despite a lot of drawn nudity there is no explicit sex, as all sexual activities are shown in various animation styles which never display hardcore parts. There is a lot of explicit violence but animation graphism lessens its brutal impact. Julius Cesar is green with no reason, but Egyptian characters follow historically coherent racial skin colours pattern. Egypt and Rome are well presented but many surrealist references to modern culture, history and arts elsewhere provide an unexpected but interesting experience. To resume, it is not among the best animated films I have watched, but it is certainly not forgettable either.

this movie is 100% aesthetic. although it's not even close to its sequence, Belladonna of Sadness (1973), i simply loved it so much, and honestly i've never watched something like this. if you're a fan of the Japanese culture + trash films, i can't recommend it enough. basically, a group of time travellers go back to the Cleopatra era in order to investigate the plans of a rival planet. there, the young Cleopatra is being turned into a sex machine in order to stop the nymphomaniac dictator Caesar.

as for the plot: female objetification at its best (literally - at some point, one of the female characters is packed up and delivered at a maniac's front door). by the way, the story itself doesn't make sense at all. for example, when Kureopatora and Apollodoria try to poison Caesar, the poison ends up healling him from several mental disorders - it seems like they wanted to include those elements but didn't know how to do so. the reason of the time travel also doesn't make sense at all. plus the audio is a bit screwed up (i'm pretty sure this is not an issue with the print i watched).

the movie deals with revolution, and works like a parody of classic history ("Et tu, Brute?"). it includes rape, zoophilia, incest, pedophilia and gay-bashing references. it has some unexpected moments, such as an Astro Boy appearance. for an underground/low budget animation, i must admit Kureopatora is pretty impressive. not only one of the very first X-Rated cartoons, it has definitely paved the way for Miyazaki (and everyone else). it is a rare movie and the subtitles are even rarer (it has never been released outside Japan, and even there the DVD release was very limited) so if you have the chance to watch it don't miss it :-)

p.s.: the banana scene is everythingggggg!

Osamu Tezuka's vision of Cleopatra might be one of the most under-rated movies in the history of Japanese animation. Maybe it's because the movie is very old or maybe because it was promoted as a sex-cartoon outside of Japan. But people are missing a really wonderful gem here.

In one scene there is nothing-is-holy slapstick, nonsense and experimental FX and the next one is dead serious again. But it might be this very bizarre mixture of humor and drama that make this movie so emotional and unforgettable.

On the technical side the movie is very well done. The animation are fluid and even though they can't compare with later productions they are very good for their time. The musical score doesn't have a wide variety of styles but it always suits the scene and the wonderful main theme certainly ensures that tears will be shed at the end.

I can't highly enough recommend this movie even if it might not be everybody's cup of tea.