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March 2010
voice cast: Dino Di Durante, Silvia Colloca, and Vincent Spano
director: Boris Acosta
85 minutes (18) 2009
widescreen ratio 1.85:1
Anchor Bay blu-ray region B retail
RATING: 7/10
review by Richard Bowden
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Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic
After returning from the crusades, the soldier Dante discovers that his true love Beatrice has been slain, along with her family. In seeking to
gain her back he is forced to enter Hell itself, accompanied by Virgil the poet as a guide, and then eventually face Lucifer himself.
High culture collides dramatically with low in this anime, a spin-off from the imminent computer game from EA. Whether or not you take to it will
depend on your view of Dante, Japanese animation, and video game tie-ins, as well as more generally on the cross-fertilisation between different
cultural artefacts - always a contentious subject. Most of those in the target market for Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic will not be
over-familiar with the original source but there's no need to climb on any literary high-horses, although general observations are worthwhile.
Purists, however, may wish to stay clear of it.
Dante's original, one of the great epics of world literature, has been the inspiration of much work by writers and artists down the centuries.
IMDb lists four or five screen works with the title. Animated versions have been rare, although no doubt there's been a comicbook version, or two,
somewhere. But such is the nature of things that this present version appears in a year along with a rival animated production titled more succinctly
Dante's Inferno - one shorter in length, but apparently superior to this in its fidelity to the original. The most notable live-action version
has always been that of 1935 with Spencer Tracy, an even freer adaptation than the one we have here, in which the horrendous visions are compressed
into 10 minutes of a much longer narrative.
By contrast, the present version spends most of its running time on these elements, depicting at length Dante's journey through the nine circles
of hell to reach his beloved Beatrice. Perhaps sensing a need for variety between the titanic battles that this progress involves, Dante's Inferno:
An Animated Epic breaks up the hero's progress with several flashbacks, not in the original, during which the true state of affairs and Dante's
real moral stature becomes more and more explained.
The character of Beatrice has been changed as part of this new narrative device, giving her a
more dynamic role in the narrative as well as providing the romantic core. Whether or not Dante would have appreciated his ideal love appearing
briefly as the bride of Lucifer, or his reflective protagonist-self metamorphosing into an axe-wielding warrior figure more Conan than Christian,
one can only conjecture; but a target audience will respond to the changes. Only Dante's guide, the poet Virgil, keeps some of his original quiet
dignity.
Given the EA game standing behind the release, it's no surprise that Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic has action and a plot structure more
reflective of that more commercial source than Dante's leisurely writing. Much of the moral depth and complexity of the book has been jettisoned
thereby in favour of arcs of swift movement. The original contained a more sophisticated and extended version of damnation than the mere nine circles
of doom rather simplistically imagined here, each becoming just another test for our hero to reach, then duly pass through. The original's spiritual
shock and awe has been replaced by a gamer's inevitable level-creep, where it is never really in doubt that Hell is likely to be overcome. It's a
considerable reduction of the medieval original's salutary purpose, even if the ending of the film attempts to have it both ways.
The original Inferno, one part of the three-part Divine Comedy, makes particular use of allegory throughout, in ways an educated
medieval reader would be expected to follow. Understandably feeling that allegory is not something that modern audiences will sit through at great
length without growing restless, and with the imperatives of a game franchise to support, one imagines Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic
was always going to be obliged to substitute breathless action for contemplation, sketched in typical anime style.
Suffice to say that the animation on offer here is certainly vivid even if, by comparison to the Shrek-like pictorial quality of the game
(a trailer for which is helpfully included as an extra on the disc), the line drawn work seems dated in style. Some, incidentally, have noticed
a lack of continuity in the rendering of Dante's features. At first I thought each of the nine circles cleverly had its own subtle visual identity,
but no: it's just because eight studios from America, North Korea and Japan all had input. It's an inconsistency that's a little distracting; one
indication perhaps of a rushed production, tied to release dates elsewhere.
Japanese fantasy anime and manga have a tradition of dealing with the matter of monsters and shadow worlds, often with their own original mythologies
and shock tactics - so much so that they sometimes give censors pause for thought. It was one reason why they acquired such a cult following. But
there's no tentacle horror intruding here; no stomach-churning changes of form, no real depravity, while the sexual content is reduced to occasional
titillation.
Hell, one would hope, ought to be the most alarming and terrible spectacle of all, an updated warning to all who behold it, a moral
imperative to reform, a presentation of the most terrible of terrors. But the horrors of Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic leave us frankly
un-aghast and un-chastened. Whether or not the creators have been constrained by deference to the august original or just the mass-market demands
of their sponsors is hard to say; but for a real walk on the dark side you would be better off with something like the now elderly Devil Man
(aka: Debiruman) or, most memorably, the notorious Urotsukid�ji.
The blu-ray disc has few extras besides the aforementioned game trailer, but does include some line story-boarding to show how the final version
came about. My recommendation, should you wish to purchase, is to go for the DVD. It would be interesting to know whether the film went to the game
first for inspiration or to the original work. One suspects the former.
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