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The Spine of Night Movie Review

The Spine of Night is a 2021 adult animated dark fantasy film directed by Philip Gelatt and starring Richard E. Grant. It’s a giant blast from the past.

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“Tremble before the immensity of the night!“

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When ancient, dark magic falls into sinister hands, a group of heroes from different eras and cultures must band together to defeat it at all costs. The director basically gave homage to all of those adult animated movies from the seventies and eighties, in particular referencing ‘Heavy Metal’ in its trippiest elements and Ralph Bakshi’s ‘Fire and Ice’ in its high fantasy storytelling and mythology.

The storyline is far from great. It is definitely a wonderfully fantastical movie as it’s very out there in its plot, but it’s also overly complicated with very little attention paid to its characters. The worst aspects of the movie are the characters and the voice acting. None of the voice actors did a particularly good job and some even sounded rather amateurish. Of the characters, the witch and the main villain were memorable, but again not a lot of care went into developing either of their characters.

That is the case with most of this movie. The animation did most of the work and the vision while the overall execution of the story and everything else was either subpar or passable. The movie being divided into different time periods and stories was interesting and I liked that it all tied well into this story of cyclical violence around the device of this magical object. Being set in the same world, but in different timelines was also quite intriguing.

What I loved about The Spine of Night was its animation. The rotoscoped technique as it was done here reminded me so much of these older movies from decades prior and it’s great seeing somebody give homage to these forgotten cult classics. The movie is visually artistic and its crazier elements were also pleasingly trippy and strange. The score and sound effects were also quite good, but the directing and pacing were inferior and the lack of originality was an issue.

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