The animated action-fantasy The Spine of Night is a major throwback and will likely feel satisfying to those who came of age in the 1980s and loved the likes of Fire and Ice and Heavy Metal. The movie is many years in the making, with the detailed rotoscoping process infused to give it the look of the cartoons that one may have rented at their local Blockbuster (and on VHS, not DVD) in the days of yore.
The Spine of Night does embrace all the tropes of its forefathers. It feels naughty to watch this cartoon — it’s for adults and for good reason. There’s lots of nudity. There’s lots of violence. There are epic lines like ‘whatever you dream will be,’ and ‘we all have masters to serve.’ If one were a thirteen-year-old boy at a sleepover, it’s likely this film would be talked about for years to come. But there are deeper messages here too, like the corruption of power, and the enduring strength of a strong woman.
The film was the brainchild of Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King. King says they tried out this world in short form and he kept dreaming about what if they took the chance to expand it. Gelatt and King then passed a screenplay back and forth to flesh out their dreamscape. They felt giddy to continue to make animation for adults.
King wanted the opportunity to resurrect something he doesn’t see enough of: “In the 70s and 80s when adult animation had its heyday, I was convinced I would continue to see it be made and I’d get a whole lifetime of this stuff I loved. But it never really happened, and it became harder to make for smaller and smaller audiences. There just weren’t the decades of adult animation that I thought would happen.”
Gelatt continues, “Adult animation as an art form should be free and imaginative. Whatever you can draw you can make. The possibilities are wild, but they don’t tend to be that way. It always felt to me like the possibilities for animation to reach an adult audience feels obvious and that animation should be going in that direction. It feels like a thing that should exist, and it’s crazy to me that there isn’t more of it.”
The film has created some epic female characters as well, most memorably with Lucy Lawless as Tzod. When asked if the creators were subtly advocating for a matriarchy with this film (as evidenced throughout, too much power is never a good thing), they had some interesting thoughts.
Says Gelatt, “We’ve tried the other way, so a new way couldn’t hurt. We envisioned a world that was built on unjust hierarchies in this movie. I’m certainly not opposed to it. My wife wouldn’t argue too much.” King adds, “I don’t know if we will ever see one in my lifetime, but I’m ready for it.” Gelatt stresses, “A non-hierarchical system would be preferable for sure.”
A stand-out in the film is watching an animated version of Lucy Lawless voicing a naked swamp witch who dons a human skull on her head. The creating pair agreed they wanted to take care with their female characters.
“I mean we very much wanted to modernize a lot of the things we love about older fantasy work without the baggage of a lot of male gaze kind of views of women," says King. "When we were designing the characters, I talked a lot with my very patient and loving wife. We talked about things she’d love to see in the genre. For example, we made a character that is naturalistically nude… We wanted women in a fantasy world that wasn’t so secondary or archetypal.”
“When I watch Heavy Metal now, part of me is embarrassed by it," he continues. "At its core what we were trying to do with this movie is something like Heavy Metal but doesn’t feel retrograde… I think it represents a fresh perspective and can still be violent, and naked, and mystical.”
The world built by Gelatt and King is also populated by a killer soundscape, throwing one back to the best arcade game, or the spookiest Halloween, or your favorite episode of He-Man. King spoke of the combinations used to create the world of sound in the movie: “A lot of the music is inherited from the short film. There’s medieval folk, and 80s synth, and a little bit of metal… Breaking it out into the sonic landscape of the film is always how I envisioned it. Peter Scartabello did this incredible score… We thought of it in the same way as rotoscoping… We really thought of it as of an era.”
The pair went on to say having an iconic voice cast helped with making The Spine of Night its very own thing.
“I was so nervous to meet Lucy," admits Gellatt. "She’s so larger than life and genre royalty. I wrote her a letter, and she watched the movie and said she wanted to do it…. She is exactly as you would want her to be — foul-mouthed and charming. She thought really deeply about the character and was very concerned about her accent. She did not want Tzod to feel like Zena, and she made her really unique. It was a really hard job because the actors had to match their lips to existing animation. Lucy was just really exacting her process. We were so lucky to have her.”
Both writers wanted to use mythology to send a message throughout The Spine of Night. King stresses, “Myths shape the reality of who we are along with hierarchies in society, and we, of course, can’t talk about hierarchy without talking about patriarchy. It’s historically extremely violent towards women and their experiences. It’s directly illustrated in the film when Tzod is captured and taken into a Slave Leia setting… It’s endemic to hierarchy…and if you can give something a name you then can know how to discuss it and form ways to combat it. Myths have that possibility, but they are also a way to distract you from the real day-to-day; insidious systemic evils because otherwise, you are constantly looking for Darth Vaders…. When you let evil define its own mythology, it’s an uphill battle to defang that.”
Gelatt chimes in with, “I do think the movie also offers a hopefulness to keep going. I think we struck that tone of a hopeful apocalypse. I hope that people take it that way and it resonates with them in these dark times.”
More than anything, the pair is most hopeful the film encourages people to get out and support adult animation. Gelatt stresses, “The more people support these types of films, the more likely they are to get made.”
The Spine of Night is now available to stream on most platforms.