The Curious Case of an Animated 1001 Nights

Woodcut illustration from A Thousand and One Nights by Friedrich Gross, 1830

A friend told me about A Thousand and One Nights a Japanese 1969 adult anime feature film directed by Eiichi Yamamoto. The film was a hit in Japan but given limited screenings in America in 1970. As an X-rated animated film, it did not seem to appeal to an American audience in 1969.

The dubbed version of the film is now very rare, and has never been released on home video, and may be considered lost.

An English-dubbed version was cut to 100 minutes. The film predates the more successful release of Fritz the Cat, the first American X-rated animated film, by three years.

Having read the classic anonymous Tales from the Thousand and One Nights in college, I can only imagine what the filmmakers might have depicted based on some of the more erotic scenes.

This is NOT Disney’s story of Aladdin. In fact, Aladdin is not part of the original Arabic text. Still, it is one of the best-known tales in One Thousand and One Nights (AKA The Arabian Nights) though it was added to the collection in the 18th century by the Frenchman Antoine Galland, who acquired the tale from a Syrian Maronite storyteller named Hanna Diyab. "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" is one of the best known and most retold of all fairy tales.

Has anyone seen the film or know where it’s available? I can't find it, but I did find the original Japanese trailer for the film which I originally tried to post on my Tumblr site - but it was blocked. It's curious because I would hardly consider the trailer to be X-rated and I know that Tumblr still has far more X-rated and clearly pornographic images. That is despite their admirable attempts to clean up their image. Their algorithms for doing so really suck.