Blog Post: 3-Madame Butterfly

If you haven't seen the stop-motion animation of Madame Butterfly by Pjotr Sapegin, you need to. This animation tells the story of a young woman who falls in love with a US Navy Sailor after having sex with him in Japan in the 1900s. It then goes on to show the man leaving while the animation continues, showing the woman growing and producing his child. As the woman waits for him to return to show him their child together, she is sitting around outside just praying for him to get back. Well, one day he does and he brings his new girlfriend.

Then they end up taking the baby without saying much to the Japanese woman. The woman is crushed, since this is a stop-motion animation and the characters are dolls, it then shows the woman getting very depressed and dismantling herself. After this, the parts end up flying out into the sea, as if to say "give me back my child and sailor". Then, the woman turns into a butterfly and realizes that everything will be okay, after all.

Stop-motion and claymation film, have always interested me just because of the amount of time it takes to create a small story and video. Pjotr Sapegin is definitely talented in this realm and I can appreciate how he used the doll itself and dismantled it, I think this brought the realism of the story out and showed that he is just attempting to tell a story and not pretending like the people are not dolls. I would definitely enjoy watching a few more of these