Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)

Movie Info

Chill, ladies…there’s enough Dante to go around

Dante has returned from the Crusades only to learn that his beloved Beatrice has died.  Dante’s action have doomed Beatrice to Hell, and now Dante must journey into the pits of Hell to save her from eternal damnation.  With Virgil as his guide, Dante faced with the horror of hell which makes him reexamine his own past, the people in his life, and how he fell to a lowly state.  Lucifer has plans for Beatrice, and Dante is her only hope if he can conquer his own demons.

Directed by Mike Disa, Shukō Murase, Yasuomi Umetsu, Victor Cook, Jong-Sik Nam, Kim Sang-jin, and Lee Seung-Gyu, Dante’s Inferno:  An Animated Epic is an animated horror video game adaptation.  Based on 2010’s Dante’s Inferno by Visceral Games, the film and the game are adaptations of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy which was written from 1308-1320.  The direct-to-DVD film featured segments based on each level of hell directed by different directors.

There’s only one thing wrong with Dante and Beatrice’s baby…IT’S ALIVE!!!

I had to take a class in college which largely focused on Dante’s Inferno and the study of virtue and vice.  As a result, the whole Dante’s Inferno adaptation interested me.  While it is based on a video game, even the video game took a lot from the outline of Inferno.  While a bit too long, the film does have some interesting sequences.

A lot of these game adaptations are quite short, but Dante’s Inferno:  An Animated Epic is a slightly longer adaptation.  The film goes through level after level of Hell focusing on each sin (like the original source material) and has a much more fractured Dante facing his mistakes.  Much of Dante’s Inferno was a reflection of the time in which it was written (with Dante putting his own pot-shots on who is in Hell), and that aspect is largely lost for obvious reasons…but with less context and more fighting, the movie drags at points.

The movie has a good voice cast with Graham McTavish, Vanessa Branch, Steve Blum, and Peter Jessop playing the main roles of Dante, Beatrice, Lucifer, and Virgil respectively.  The movie brings in the big guns with Mark Hamill providing the voice of Dante’s father with other decent voice actress also providing good performances.

Beatrice has a new “man” in her life

The art of the movie is provided by Film Roman and involved multiple animation studios.  While each sequence does have animation in different styles, it would have been nice to see much more radical changes between the levels in the format of other anthology, experimental films.  In many ways, you might not expect much from a video game adaptation, but it could have actually been really edgy and clever if it pushed itself farther.

The biggest problem with Dante’s Inferno:  An Animated Epic is the video game.  Dante’s Inferno was a fun video game but the game ended on a “cliffhanger” following Dante’s path created in his story.  Lucifer is “defeated” and Dante has moved on to Purgatori.  There are still miles and miles (plus Paradiso) before he can potentially get back to Beatrice…but the lack of a Dante’s Inferno video sequel quashed the possibility of a movie sequel.  The game’s maker Visceral closed in 2017 which most likely means Dante’s reached the lowest circle he can…and there is no escape.