Tripwire Reviews Shudder’s The Spine Of Night Animated Feature

Walking A Fine Line Between Realism And Fantasy

Tripwire’s contributing editor Laurence Boyce takes a look at Shudder’s The Spine Of Night available to watch now on YouTube…

The Spine of Night

Directors: Morgan Galen King, Philip Gelat
Stars: Lucy Lawless, Richard E Grant, Patton Oswalt

Channelling the spirit of late 70s/early 80s adult orientated rotoscope animations such as Heavy Metal and Ralph Bakshi’s version of Lord of the Rings, The Spine of Night is a defiantly old school piece of work. Yet, whilst it undoubtedly plays with nostalgia, the film’s overwhelming atmosphere is one of compelling nihilism as it presents us with an impressively rendered onslaught of violence and despair.

The film begins with Tzod (Lucy Lawless), naked and roaming through the snow covered mountains. Exhausted from her epic quest, she finds The Guardian (Richard E. Grant), the keeper of the mysteries of a strange blue flower which bestows strange powers on those who deign to cover its secrets. She recounts her own story of death and destruction, which involves Ghal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith) a scholar who becomes corrupted by the power of the bloom and soon unleashes his wrath on mankind. Tzod regales The Guardian with stories of those who would stand against him throughout the eras. But how will balance be restored to a land beset by centuries of tyranny and awash with the blood of those who have died needlessly violent deaths.

On the surface The Spine of Night is a wilfully violent and visceral animation that revels in gore and destruction. There are plenty of battle sequences in which limbs are brutally hacked off, bodies are bisected and the blood flows freely throughout. But there’s little sense of this all being done to appeal to the ‘gorehound’ denominator (though genre fans just looking for gruesome blood spilling will probably get something out of the film). Instead there’s a sense of rebuke to the usual sanitised violence which is common in the world of fantasy. Here, death is not a side product of cool set pieces – it’s a nasty and brutal affair.

Indeed, much of the film takes a swipe as some of the more utopian aspects (and sometimes subtly right wing) aspects of genre storytelling. Instead of the singular, super powered protagonist the heroes of the various story segments are ordinary people whose fate is often a dark one – but it is their collective effort that makes something of a difference. The film also deals with ideas of a populace kept under poverty, ignorance and fear by an arrogant ruling class, slightly more complex that the simple ‘taking over the world’ mantra espoused by most villains.

With the political undertones and the general air of darkness, it would suggest that The Spine of Night would be something of difficult affair to enjoy. Yet it’s a consistently engaging work which manages to excite and provoke. It’s undoubtedly a technically wonderful piece of work. Funded by Kickstarter, the rotoscope animation allows a tension between realism and the dreamlike, which seems even more impressive in today’s CGI age. The directors clearly revel in building their nightmarish world and it’s never anything less than breathtaking in its ambition. And for all its nihilistic narrative tendencies, the film still manages to offer glimmers of hope even when mankind seems to be at its darkest.

Thinking that this would be a fine replacement for something like He-Man would be as grave mistake as thinking the 1970s Watership Down adaptation would be great for little ones who like cute, fluffy bunnies. But those wanting a bold and brave affair that is tinged with nostalgia will find lots to admire in The Spine of Night.

The film is available on Shudder now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS5wCkg_aI4)