As an Italian, it always tickled me silly how back in the late 2000s EA’s idea for competiting with Sony’s God Of War franchise was to pillage The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and basically transform it into a power fantasy action game about saving a damsel in distress, which happens to be done by traversing Hell as described by the Tuscanian poet.
I guess because it was a well known public domain literary work that would also work as a quick and dirty band-aid to feign some refinement, and to be honest everyone was jumping on the hack n slash action game bandwagon at the time, so of course EA would have tried their hands at it.
Still feels fuckin random because they could just have made a Roman Empire themed hack n slash, but i guess they couldn’t push a marketing campaign literally encouraging to “go to hell” and the “sin to win” marketing shizzle.
I’m not even offended because this is so fuckin american it’s hilarious, i mean, sure, it’s based on Alighieri’s first book of The Divine Comedy as in it has the concept of venturing through Hell, it has a guy named Dante, a gal named Beatrice, and The Devil(TM) sure, it’s the same thing.
It just happens that this Dante is a Templar Knight back from the Crusades that ventures through hell not in a metaphorical fashion, but literally because Lucifer has decided to ensnare and corrupt the soul of Dante’s soon-to-be-wife Beatrice, whom apparently Dante betrayed.
Talk about how loose your “loose” retelling can be.
It’s more or less fairly faithful to the plot seen in the videogame, skimping over most details (and some not so small “details”) in order to fit the entire narrative under 90 minutes, which has the effect of most confrontations with the “Hell demon bosses” rushed and kinda betrays the plot originally belonging to a videogame.
Even though it’s most likely for the better since the story isn’t great to begin with, and the film focuses on delivering plenty of action and spectacle, with lots of gore, violent imagery and peculiar redesigns of mythological creatures as depicted in the game, alongside some very mild nudity.
The most notable feature of Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic is the fact it’s an anthology.
I figured the Wikipedia page entry was wrong, i mean, it would be a stupid idea to keep the same narrative but having the various chapter/circles of hell segments handled by a different studio each…
Wait, that’s exactly the case, and i’m not really sure why, i mean, The Animatrix did the 9 episodes anthology format… but that was an actual anthology of different stories, meant to connect with the Matrix mainline movies, but still a proper anthology.
The only reason why i assume it’s because it was cheaper to commission various animation studios for just two or three chapter instead of just having them do an entire movie, it has to be.
Regardless of why, it’s pretty jarring, and it’s deceptive because the movie starts off by crediting just Film Roman, a long-in-tooh animation studio mostly specialized in TV series and having worked on anything from Family Guy, early Simpsons, King of The Hill, the Spawn animated (but also did the Turok: Son Of Stone film)… which is both fair and not, as they did the first 3 parts/segments, and the segment that follows isn’t that drastically different looking, even if you wonder why now Dante has his hair loose like a barbarian or a glam rock singer and why Virgil has the laurel fused with his head.
Then midway through you’re suddendly the animation style and character designs are 100 % anime (ironically by a Korean studio, as Production I.G. Just handled the final chapter/circle), like this is a weird alternate dimension Devilman bootleg thing, then two segments and the style changes again, as do the character designs.
Again, it is jarring, made even more that the quality of animation can fluctuate wildly, with some beautiful shots then cutting to obviously cheaper sequences where the CG machine gears or shit like that sticks out like a sore thumb from the traditionally animated main bulk, even though i gotta admit the overall quality is good, the various Korean (and Singaporean) animators and studios commissioned also do showcase a variety in style too, despite the Greed chapter having those shitty ass CG inserts… and well, the stupid idea of applying an anthology production method to a linear style narrative.
It’s expecially odd as some flashbacks are referred back to more than once, and so it’s extra weird to see the incipit of a scene you’ve seen before… with a completely different art style and character designs.
The english dub it’s terrific, though, gotta say, having pretty much the same cast of the game if i remember correctly, but still, can’t go wrong with Mark Hamill as a VA for your project.
Overall, Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic it’s decent, given the absurd ass idea of having an anthology approach while also telling a concise connected narrative, the source material the director and animators had to work with (as in a very, very VERY loose retelling of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno), and the fact this was pretty much meant as nothing more than advertising for the videogame, since it came out not even a week after the game did.
It definitely is entertaining and delivers on the bloody spectacle, the gory demon dismemberment, and the art styles on display are indeed pretty cool and fit the main appeal of Visceral’s Dante Inferno, so it’s not a must see, but it’s a fun curiosity.
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