Trivia / Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show

• Banned in China: The manga and its animated film adaptation, Midori, are banned in their native Japan for depicting graphic violence on animals, which was illegal there. It's a miracle it was even made, as no one wanted to sponsor it, and it took the author five years and his entire life's savings to finish it. It did see a limited print run in Japan after the law was overturned. As for the film, the master reels were confiscated and wouldn't be recovered until 2013.
• Completely Different Title: In Japan, the manga is known as Shojo Tsubaki, roughly translated as "The Camellia Girl". When the manga was translated for US markets, it was changed to Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show.
• Creator-Driven Successor: It is also a more direct one of Hiroshi Harada's previous work, Nido to Mezamenu Komori Uta for those very same reasons and the fact both movies has kids as their main characters, the key difference is that Nido is mostly a political short while Midori obviously isn't.
• Development Hell: Because he was unable to find sponsors, the creator did the entirety of the movie all by himself, taking 5 years in the process and having over 5,000 hand-drawn pages needing to be made.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While the film is easily accessible legally, the first (and only) print of the English-translated manga is a rare collector's item that sells between $50-$200. It's easy to read it online, however.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For a long time, it was rumored that six minutes of footage were removed from the film and destroyed by the Japanese government due to the illegal imagery present in them. However, in a 2020 interview with a Lost Media Wiki user, the production company explained that the only things removed was a narration at the beginning and a brief scene where the screen went black as the sound of an earthquake played, both of which were intended solely for the theatrical viewing. Additionally, they stated that, while the film was initially censored via blurring violent scenes and muting discriminatory lines, the DVD version (AKA the one most people have seen) is the uncensored version, debunking the claims that the film was still in its censored form.

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