One of the films I enjoyed at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was Chris Sullivan’s Consuming Spirits, a haunting animated tale of solitude in Appalachia that was 15 years in the making. The Tragedy of Man, the new film by Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, has been brewing for even longer: this ambitious 160-minute movie has been 25 years in the making.
The Tragedy of Man is an adaptation of a play of the same name, and it looks like a bleak but gorgeous epic. The story is about Lucifer (yup, the one and the only) putting Adam to sleep and taking him, by dream, on a guided tour of human misery through the ages. It’s Satan and Adam’s Excellent Adventure, but something tells me rock and roll won’t save the world in the end.
No firm release date yet, but this is definitely on my radar and my must-see list. After the cut I’ve placed Jankovics’s 1974 short animated film Sisyphus, his own take on that potent myth of eternal struggle.
[Cartoon Brew via Quiet Earth]Sisyphus by Marcell Jankovics