Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic

An animated film set in hell. Dante is a crusader. He fought at Jerusalem and is coming home. He is expecting Beatrice. When he arrives she is dead. Her soul is taken and carried to hell. Dante goes after it. He finds a guide. The poet Virgil accompanies him. From there the film passes through the circles of hell. Each circle is given to a sin. Lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. There is a section for each and each was animated by a different studio. So the look keeps changing. One section is like Japanese anime, another in a Korean line, another in the style of American comics. The narrative presents this not as a flaw but as a structure. As Dante goes deeper his own past opens. What he did on the crusade is shown one piece at a time. He is not innocent. Massacre, betrayal and lies. What the narrative is interested in is not rescue but a reckoning: its idea is that Dante goes to save Beatrice and that what he actually meets is the crimes he committed. Lucifer appears at the end and counts Beatrice as property. The violence is very heavy. The narrative softens no scene and the sexual content is explicit. The structure is tied to a video game. The film was made to promote it and the plot is the game's. Its relation to the source text is loose. The structure of Dante's poem is kept but the character is turned into a warrior and the poem's intellectual side is dropped entirely. The running time is short; around eighty minutes. Graham McTavish, Vanessa Branch and Peter Jessop are in the voice cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard animation and sectioned anthology structures. Who it is not for: anyone expecting fidelity; the narrative shares only a name and a skeleton with the poem.