ANI-MOVIES, *Winds Of Change

Originally titled Metamorphoses, Hello Kitty's home company of Sanrio put out a joined American/Japanese full-length movie in 1978 retitled Winds Of Change. After its premiere met with failure, it was released the following year with the new title and some minutes cut after taking a whopping three years for American animators to complete it. This was meant to be Sanrio's take on Fantasia and inspired by Disney's Golden Age movies. The movie was an anthology of tales all starring the same characters portraying in various fables written by the ancient Roman poet Ovid he branded Metamorphoses. Winds Of Change featured bizarre dreamlike imagery with the entire film being narrated by Peter Ustinov who also did all the voices, which had the knighted British actor going back and forth between playing the characters both male and female, along with telling the story in a sometimes Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy motif. This approach with Ustinov both works for and against the premise of the movie as it makes it difficult to follow the various plots going on.

The movie stars a universal male lead called Wondermaker who takes on the roles of different characters in Greek mythology. The first one is of the hunter Acteon who is turned into a deer by the goddess Diana after he sneaked a peek at her when she was having a bath, which leaves our newly transformed deer to be eaten alive by his own hunting dogs. The second chapter is the tale of Orpheus as he follows his bride into the underworld, although here the afterlife is run by the Roman god Pluto and not Hades. Thirdly is of a spiteful girl being infected with the curse of Envy which makes her long for the attention of the god Hermes. The penultimate story is of Perseus and his quest to slay Medusa who gains the favor of other gods after helping stranded old folks. The finale is of Phaeton, son of the sun god Helios, as he makes off with his dad's chariot driven by a trio of fiery flying horses which causes all kinds of cosmic calamity.

Winds Of Change is an estranged bundle of weirdness as future animator of The Boy And The Beast, Takashi Masunaga tried to direct this farce, but to little success. The soundtrack was done by Alec Costandinos and Billy Goldenberg who padded it out with original disco music, each song of which fits the story their backing, but it still seems out of place with Greek myths. Despite this being a Sanrio production, it was not intended for children as there is some major violence and full-frontal nudity which is pretty nasty since some of them are shriveled-up gorgons. The film also keeps flipping back and forth between Greek and Roman god names and flubbing the original source material. Peter Ustinov taking on the role of everyone and everything in the movie has its moments, especially when he's doing the divide goddesses, but his recitation of each fable bounces between generic storytelling and Looney Tunes levels of movie riffing. As one of the first combined efforts between animation studios on both ends of the Pacific, Winds Of Change is a singular grotesquerie with nothing else that possible compares to its outlandish style.