By Nicole Veneto

Recommending The Spine of the Night depends on how much you’d like to see things like decapitations, eye-gouging, and people being disemboweled in your high-fantasy animated features, in which case Spine is everything you could hope for and a whole lot more.

The Spine of the Night, now on VoD and featuring the voices of Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Richard E. Grant, and Betty Gabriel, coming to SHUDDER on March 24.

A scene from The Spine of the Night. Photo: Yellow Veil Pictures

Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt’s rotoscoped animated feature The Spine of the Night is a movie that seems to have materialized off the side of a heavy metal band’s touring van; a phantasmagoric mural of black magic, bloody ultraviolence, and gritty dark fantasy searing itself into your retinas like an afterimage of adult animation’s heyday. An epic throwback as indebted to the work of Ralph Bakshi (chiefly Fire and Ice) and 1981’s sci-fi anthology Heavy Metal as it is to legendary Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, The Spine of the Night is much more than the sum of its stoner-animation influences. Similar to Phil Tippet’s stop-animated passion project Mad God, Spine stands out as an anomaly within today’s CGI-beholden animation landscape by sheer virtue of favoring old-school techniques like rotoscoping and airbrushed matte backgrounds to prop up its explicit and uncompromising content.

The Spine of the Night unfurls as a web of interweaving stories following the centuries-long effects of The Bloom, a magical blue flower bestowed by fallen gods that grants immense power to those who possess it. Though guarded from humanity by a lone figure known as The Guardian (voiced by Oscar-nominee Richard E. Grant [Can You Ever Forgive Me?]) in a snowy mountain lair, The Bloom’s spores nonetheless spread and are propagated throughout the land. Some, like the swamp witch Tzod (Xena Warrior Princess herself, Lucy Lawless), use the flower for healing and enthnogenic purposes for the indigenous peoples. Others, like the scholar Ghal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith), manipulate its power to build oppressive, bloody empires as immortal despot rulers. In the film’s framing narrative, Tzod recounts to The Guardian how Ghal-Sur stole her reserve of The Bloom to usurp the dictatorial Lord Pyrantin (Patton Oswalt in a villainous vocal-turn) and brought centuries of misery upon the city and people of Pyr.

Recommending The Spine of the Night depends on how much you’d like to see things like decapitations, eye-gouging, and people being disemboweled in your high-fantasy animated features, in which case Spine is everything you could hope for and a whole lot more. Had the film been submitted to the MPA, the amount of violence and (nonsexual) nudity depicted throughout would easily have earned it an NC-17. Such graphic content appears to be the reason why a certain number of critics and audiences on the festival circuit dismissed the movie as an aesthetically noteworthy (but otherwise unremarkable) nostalgia-trip into ’80s sword-and-sorcery fantasia. Given its rather cynical view of human corruption through power (another aspect shared with Tippet’s Mad God), The Spine of the Night has little, if anything, to offer those looking for a feel-good, family-friendly watch. Putting this on for your children will result in horrific night terrors about people being burnt alive and having their faces melted off.

A scene from The Spine of the Night. Photo: Yellow Veil Pictures

Spine’s rotoscoped characters also have a fair share of detractors. Over at RogerEbert.com, Simon Abrams singled out the film’s “drab and dramatically inert animation style” for a “lack of inflection to the characters’ facial and physical features.” In contrast to the lavishly illustrated backdrops depicting pinkish-gray tundras and blushing gradient sunsets (which Abrams somehow describes as “unexciting and un-nuanced”), the character animation can appear crude in its simplicity, with characters rendered in flat colors without any shading. I’ll admit there’s an uncanny quality to the rotoscoping technique  — at least compared to traditional 12-to-24 frames per second — yet this is arguably both a deliberate stylistic choice (another tip of the hat to Bakshi) as well as the product of a small in-house production. Animated features for adults are still incredibly niche; they don’t promise the sort of return on investments kids’ movies do. This goes double for a hyperviolent dark fantasy based on an original concept and not an existing intellectual property. Without an animation studio or wealthy producers to fund such a bold project, Galen King and Gelatt financed Spine out of their own pockets. Just my personal opinion, but I’ll take a largely unfiltered creative vision with some budgetary limitations over a multimillion-dollar artistic compromise (as was the fate that unfortunately befell Bakshi’s Cool World).

With all its eye-catchingly exorbitant visuals and over-the-top explicit content, it’s easy to read The Spine of the Night on a purely surface level. However, the themes Spine deals in are particularly potent when it comes to showing man’s relationship to the environment, and that this interaction is markedly gendered. Exploitation of The Bloom and the swamp land surrounding Pyr are framed as gendered acts of violence against the feminine body. Tzod refers to the swamp as “her mother” and Lord Pyrantin speaks of its destruction in terms chillingly analogous to rape: “I’m going to spread her open and take what I want from her.” This configuration is partly what drew Lawless to the role of Tzod; she is a vocal environmentalist who’s worked with Greenpeace and has recently used her platform to draw attention to the unjust imprisonment of human rights lawyer Steven Donzinger for winning a $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron on behalf of the Amazon’s indigenous population. The character of Tzod is also quite interesting in that she’s basically naked for the entire film, but never sexualized for it. Lawless described her as a “pure and elemental creature living her truth and trying to save her homeland,” all the more distinctive for her “unvarnished” and “heavy-set” appearance compared to the scantily clad buxom babes in Fire and Ice and Heavy Metal.

Despite making the Oscar shortlist for this year’s Best Animated Feature, The Spine of the Night went unrecognized in favor of industry heavyweights from Disney and Pixar, making up half the nominees. Although 2021 churned out some of the most visually audacious traditionally animated movies in recent memory (Evangelion 3.0+1.0’s snub is predictable but nonetheless aggravating), 2D animation has taken a back seat to computer generated techniques when it comes to awards season. The sole exception this year is Flee, and its chances against big-budget family features like Encanto, Luca, and Raya and the Last Dragon are slim. The Spine of the Night is a different animated beast altogether, merging the old with the new into a visceral fever dream simultaneously pushing the boundaries of both sense and style.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the new podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and Twitter @kuntsuragi for weird and niche movie recommendations.