Above is the link to a trailer to an animated film of Dante’s Inferno, titled ‘Dante’s Hell Animated’. The trailer is a collection of scenes from a full-length animated film. The defining feature of this film is that all of the dialogue and voice acting takes on the original Italian texts and utilizes English subtitles. Apparently, this is one of the only major representations of the Comedy that uses the original text. Though this is only a trailer for a longer production, it does hit most of the major scenes in Inferno.
One depiction that was interesting to see was the creature of fraud, Geryon. In this film, he is an entirely green, serpent-esque being, with the face of a man, as he is described in Inferno. In my imagination, I visualized Geryon as much less animal-like, and more like a human with animal characteristics, but this depiction make him look much more like a sphinx than how I visualized him. Regardless, this is an interesting point to visualize, because as the ‘face of Fraud,’ Geryon represents the concept of external vs. internal qualities. The premise of fraud as a sin is that one masks their true intentions with a facade. In this way, it is crucial to depict Geryon as representative of this concept; he serves a very important purpose.
Another interesting depiction is Lucifer; he is shown with three heads, one red, one black, and one whitish-yellow. These three heads are gnawing on the souls of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, their blood dribbling down the chins, and each head is crying. This is, in one sense, a piece of the climax of the Inferno, and this depiction is incredibly true to that described by Dante, with the exception of the long hair that Lucifer has (this may be a quality that Dante pointed out, but I can’t see it overtly). Further, this animation does capture the terror of the image, without being overly ‘scary’, in a sense. What I found most interesting about this segment in Inferno was the sense of awe and shock in Dante’s speech, but not like he is in the face of danger, but more so overwhelmed to observe what he is beholding. This depiction captures the spectacular image before him.
All in all, this trailer seems to present the film as an animation that attempts to be as ‘true’ to Dante’s original words as they can. Contrary to the film by Sandow Birk, the characters and dialogue inserted in the movie are those directly written by Dante. It is an interesting trailer to watch, having seen the entirety of Birk’s film. Birk takes a lot of liberties to not only translate the text and dialogue into English, but also to ‘translate the sentiment’ expressed by Dante and introduce characters who are analogous to those written in by Dante. It is interesting to see this film, which does the opposite and brings to animated life the work of Dante.
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