Dante’s Inferno will be joining Halo, The Matrix and Batman with its own collection of anime-style shorts that may not be completely faithful to Dante Alighieri’s poem, but makes up for it with lots of gore.
Real quick: I highly recommend you go watch the video in high quality over at Eurogamer, since it looks a lot better there. But video quality aside, I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, the story portrayed here is about as faithful to Dante Alighieri’s original poem as the Visceral-developed videogame is – that is to say, it isn’t accurate at all. It’s a cheesy-looking action bonanza with some clunky, cliched dialogue.
On the other hand, two of the directors working on the project did Ghost in the Shell and Samurai Champloo, respectively, and both of those are renowned as rather excellent pieces of modern animation. On the other, other hand, the trailer shows some guy getting his face chopped in half, and that’s something I can totally get behind. Plus, the art direction (or at least what we can tell from this trailer) looks absolutely stellar.
I’m really not sure what to make out of it. Also, I’m curious how they handled divvying up the various circles of hell, since there are nine of those, but only six directors. I guess some of them just had to double up or something.
Published: Nov 12, 2009 06:38 pm