Madama Butterfly was originally a short story by John Luther Long that was adapted to be a three-act play. Sapegin had named the short Aria.This play is widely known in the opera world, and is the the top 10 in terms of the number of performance runs it has had around the world. In class we had watched a retelling of the classic Italian opera. Pjotr Sapegin's retelling of Puccini's opera employed the use of toy puppets (reminiscent of Toy Story, at least to me) and stop-motion photography to create his condensed, film version of Madama Butterfly.
I would say that it felt bizarre and surreal when we watched Aria. Upon watching this short the first time, the main character gave off a sort of child-like naiveness. This lovely, euphoric feeling that we shared with her lasted until the last couple of minutes of the short. After she bears the child of a visiting sailor, he leaves for an extended period of time. He returns with his wife, on a ship with a dozen other children who you could tell he had not conceived with his wife. The sailor takes the child of Madama Butterfly, and leaves her with no one else on the island.
After realizing that the sailor had just used to have children and take them away she goes into a dark, deep state of depression. As the film winds down into its final moments, Madama Butterfly begins to tear herself apart limb by limb. She proceeds to do this until her figure skeleton is revealed and she is left, by herself, disfigured in a dark cave alone. This left with what began as a surreal, joyous film with a dark, unsettling ending. After its conclusion, I believed the shock of the events that had transpired left my classmates and I uncomfortable with the extremely dark turn that Aria had taken in the end.
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