“Dogra Magra”, Original Japanese First Release Movie Poster 1988, B2 Size (51 × 73 cm) M162
Sale price$185.00
This is an original Japanese B2 poster printed in 1988 for the film’s first theatrical release of Dogra Magra (ドグラ・マグラ), Toshio Matsumoto’s hallucinatory adaptation of Kyūsaku Yumeno’s celebrated 1935 novel. Released in Japan on 15 October 1988, the film stars Yōji Matsuda, Shijaku Katsura, Hideo Murota, Eri Misawa, Kyōko Enami, Morimoto Leo, and Fumio Watanabe.
The poster is particularly significant for its extraordinary artwork by Keiichi Ohta (太田螢一), presented within a design by Ryoichi Enomoto (榎本了壱). This collaboration produced one of the most distinctive Japanese film posters of the late 1980s.
Film background
The story begins when an unidentified young man awakens inside a psychiatric hospital with no memory of his identity or past. Two doctors attempt to reconstruct his history, gradually linking him to a possible attempted murder, a mysterious manuscript, hereditary experimentation, and a labyrinthine series of events in which memory, hallucination, and objective reality become increasingly impossible to separate.
Rather than translating Yumeno’s notoriously complex novel into a conventional mystery, Matsumoto constructs a psychological and visual maze concerned with identity, inherited memory, madness, medical authority, and the reliability of consciousness itself.
The film was directed by Toshio Matsumoto, the experimental filmmaker behind Funeral Parade of Roses, from a screenplay written with Atsushi Yamatoya. Cinematography was by Tatsuo Suzuki, production design by Takeo Kimura, and music by Haruna Miyake. The completed film runs approximately 109 minutes.
Poster design
This Japanese B2 is dominated by a surreal, grotesquely caricatured illustration by Keiichi Ohta, whose strange retro-modern imagery perfectly complements the film’s atmosphere of medical anxiety and psychological disorientation.
At the centre, a bald physician wearing round spectacles and surgical gloves holds a syringe with exaggerated delicacy. His compressed facial features, pursed lips, and half-closed eyes give him an expression that is simultaneously clinical, comic, and deeply unsettling.
Beside him, a distressed woman bends over a large cylindrical vessel, her wet black hair falling across her face. Within the transparent container appears another partially submerged female figure, introducing disturbing associations with medical experimentation, confinement, reproduction, and fragmented identity.
The four corners contain photographic portraits of the principal characters, creating a tension between the film’s live-action reality and Ohta’s distorted illustrated world. The poster is framed by decorative red and green borders reminiscent of early printed advertisements, theatrical handbills, and illustrated medical catalogues.
Across the upper portion, the title appears in enormous scarlet typography:
「ドグラ・マグラ」 “Dogra Magra”
Beneath it, the green credits identify:
「原作◆夢野久作」 “Original novel by Kyūsaku Yumeno”
and
「監督◆松本俊夫」 “Directed by Toshio Matsumoto”
The small OHTA KEIICHI / TAKEI-style artist device at upper left identifies the poster’s illustrated authorship, while the lower border retains the original production, distribution, running-time, and colour-format information.
Artwork and cultural significance
Keiichi Ohta is known for an idiosyncratic visual language combining pre-war commercial illustration, medical diagrams, grotesque caricature, Surrealism, and nostalgic industrial imagery. His work for Dogra Magra does not merely advertise the film; it creates an independent visual interpretation of Yumeno and Matsumoto’s universe.
The poster’s theatrical design was overseen by Ryoichi Enomoto, an important Japanese art director and graphic designer. Its combination of Ohta’s detailed illustration, aggressive title lettering, ornamental framing, and photographic inserts has subsequently been recognised within exhibitions devoted to important Japanese film-poster design.
As an original theatrical poster for one of the most ambitious Japanese literary adaptations of the 1980s, it holds particular interest for collectors of experimental cinema, Japanese graphic design, cult film, and post-war illustration.
Condition
Excellent. The poster retains strong colour, crisp illustrated detail, and excellent overall display impact. Light evidence of period handling are consistent with an authentic Japanese theatrical poster of this age. Please review the photograph—it shows the exact poster for sale.
This poster is an original Japanese theatrical B2 from the 1988 first-release campaign. It is not a reproduction or a modern reprint.
