Dante's Inferno: BD Review
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Page 1 of 3 Anchor Bay / 2010 / 88 Minutes / Unrated / Street Date: February 9, 2010
My first impression of Dante’s Inferno was: “Oh great, I’m going to listen to faith lessons for 90 minutes, but look at some pretty animation.” Turns out I was half right. While I typically think epics to be 2 1/2+ hours long and Dante’s Inferno lasts a mere 88 minutes it still accomplishes it’s ambition of feeling epic. This is not for children. From the LUST sequence that doesn’t shy away from some of this film’s anime origins to the gallons and gallons of blood throughout. It’s nothing that will make the most hardcore of anime fans blush, but for western audiences it is rather explicit for what is usually offered when it comes to animated fare. I wonder if the video game is equally explicit.
Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic turns out to be a visceral assault and I mean that in the best and worst possible ways. This is an animated film of extremes - extreme violence, character design and poses. The resulting effect is that at the end of the 88 minutes I felt as though I needed a nap. The film itself never really slows down. This works well to keep it from becoming boring, but at the same time it didn’t allow for the characters to be established very well, and I felt it could’ve used a break at some point if for no other reason than to appreciate some of the background design, which I think are pretty good, but there wasn’t much time to appreciate them.
It’s like a good horror movie. You need the silence before the scare. If there’s no silence than it just results in the viewer being constantly on defense. What the best horror movies do well is slow down and lull the viewer before having something jump out of the dark – even if it is only a black cat.
This film just has things jumping out and battles with TONS of blood and gore. The character animation itself is a practice in extremes. Makes me think of the Chuck Jones book Extremes and In-Betweens. This film’s focus and its strong point are its extremes, not the in-betweens. Grand gestures and poses are very interesting and VERY big, while facial expressions are somewhat limited resulting in the film having little of the subtleties of good acting within the animation itself.
Each segment of the 6 segments of the film were apparently directed by different people all over the world. On one hand I have to say it is very successful, because design and tone are kept quite consistent. In fact, if I didn’t know that it was 6 different directors I may not have been able to tell. However, the lip synch is where differences are most obvious. Early on it was good and I didn’t see any real issues, but in later sequences the lip synch is dreadful and it seems like the audio is almost out of synch with the video.
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