Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)

Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic arrives as a curiosity of 2010: an anthology assembled by six animation studios, adapting a video game that had already paraphrased a fourteenth century poem, then sent straight to video. Dante returns from the Crusades to find his household butchered and Beatrice dying, and Lucifer hauling her soul through the gates. The result is a tour of the nine circles conducted with the enthusiasm of a theme park ride through medieval theology. The film takes damnation at face value, which is to say it treats sin as sin, punished by God, catalogued by Virgil, and never as a stand-in for a contemporary grievance.

Beatrice spends most of the running time as a prize suspended over the abyss, and nobody involved seems troubled by the arrangement. The circle of Greed is populated by Dante's own father and rendered as boiling gold, an indictment of avarice in its oldest religious sense, not a critique of markets or billionaires. Gluttony is punished by being devoured, which sits at some distance from a body-positive position. The voice cast performs competently, with no accompanying conversation about who was cast and why.

None of this is a complaint. The film is sincere dark fantasy, macabre and earnest, with Mark Hamill audibly enjoying himself as the adversary. It lectures, but about penitence, and mostly to itself. The Oktyabrsky District Court in Saint Petersburg banned it in 2021 alongside Happy Tree Friends, which suggests the censors located something in it that our own taxonomy does not. That is an entirely separate category of offense from the one measured here. Zero, then. Not a whisper of the modern sensibility. Just fire, and a man walking through it for love.