"The Spine of Night" and "Cryptozoo"

American animation for adult audiences is still a rare thing, though we've been seeing more indie projects in recent years, thanks to improvements in filmmaking technology.  2021 saw the premiere of two of these films, both low budget, painstakingly animated fantasy films with a lot of violence and a lot of nudity.  

"The Spine of Night" is the more familiar project, with visuals clearly influenced by "Heavy Metal" and Ralph Bakshi's fantasy films of the 1980s.  It's an epic story of sorcerers, witches, and warriors clashing over the control of a magical plant and the terrible power that it unleashes.  This is the world of barbaric savagery and cosmic horror, with many images that could grace the cover of heavy metal albums.  Characters with names like Tzod, the Guardian, Falconhawk, and Mongrel inhabit a harsh land that gradually morphs over the centuries from a rinky-dink medieval kingdom into a nightmarish empire of darkness.  

I want to emphasize that this is definitely a film for adults.  The violence is bloody, and the most prominent female character, the witch Tzod (Lucy Lawless), mostly appears nude throughout.  However, she's not built like the usual Frank Frazetta bimbo that you'd expect, but is instead a tough old broad who refuses to be intimidated.  In fact, there's a refreshing lack of the kind of titillating material aimed at sex-obsessed teenage boys that this kind of high fantasy is usually rife with.  All the characters are a little ugly, and a little weird.  Animator Morgen Galen King and writer Philip Gelatt let their saga of horror and woe play out seriously.  While there are moments of humor, it never strays too far into camp.  

The visuals, however, are the main event.  The excellent rotoscoped animation pays homage to Ralph Bakshi, but it also improves significantly on his output.  It often feels like "The Spine of Night" is a movie that Bakshi or his imitators would have made forty years ago if it weren't for budget and technology limitations.  The hardcore ending in particular, full of glorified images of death and destruction, embraces the most macabre side of animation with everything it's got.  It feels like "The Spine of Night" should have a soundtrack featuring every hard rock musician who ever threw demon horns, and my only real complaint about the film is that its score is not nearly as kickass as it could be.  

Then you have Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski's "Cryptozoo," which imagines a world where mythical creatures are real, but very rare.  Facing constant threats from traffickers, a group of cryptozoologists decide to try to put together a Cryptozoo as a sanctuary for the cryptids, despite serious misgivings from various participants. Most of the story follows Lauren (Lake Bell), a cryptid finder trying to track down the dream-eating Baku, with the help of a new partner, a gorgon named Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia).  A subplot involves a naked hippie couple scaling the cryptozoo's fence and causing mayhem and destruction when they come upon the cryptids unawares.

"Cryptozoo" has some interesting concepts, the Cryptozoo being a thinly veiled allegory for the deeply troubled Utopian movements of the 1970s.   Phoebe is a great character, a cryptid who tries to pass herself off as human and hopes that social equality might be possible for her kind one day.  The visuals, however, are a mixed bag.  The painted, collage-style designs look like something out of a picture book by Eric Carle, the people all slightly grotesque, and the cryptids all vaguely familiar.  There are unicorns, dragons, griffins, and many more creatures, and most of them become involved in instances of gory violence.  The high degree of stylization helps keep some distance between the viewer and the worst of the upsetting content.  However, it also keeps the animation very static and I don't find it too appealing. 

Like "The Spine of Night," "Cryptozoo" is a fascinating film for the way it manages to conceptualize some of its ideas, and how it breaks so many of the taboos we associate with animation.  However, also like "The Spine of Night," it has a third act full of mayhem and destruction that leaves far too many of those interesting ideas by the wayside.  "The Spine of Night" was more of an exercise in aesthetics and could get away with it, while "Cryptozoo" doesn't come out quite so well.  I still enjoyed the film, and think it's worth tracking down for its highly unique approach, but it never won me over as much as I wish that it did.   

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