Movie Review: 'The Spine of Night'

The Spine of Night is an epic animated adventure for an adult crowd. It’s a throwback to the 70s and 80s when animated movies weren’t always made for kids. The Spine of Night uses the freedom of animation to tell a sprawling and violent story of an ancient power struggle between natives of a forest and the growing forces of power hungry conquerors more interested in subjugating the masses than in creating a future for society.

The Spine of Night stars the voice of Lucy Lawless as Tzod, a warrior queen in a forest dwelling culture. When her idyll is destroyed by a conquering force serving Lord Pyrantin (Patton Oswalt), she ends up dead only to be resurrected by an ancient and powerful flower. This leads her to travel to the source of the power of this flower, an ancient cave guarded by an equally ancient warrior, known as The Guardian (Richard E Grant).

Tzod has sought the guardian to warn him about the arrival of man and the growing malcontent nature of humanity. She proceeds to tell a series of stories about how man also discovered the power of the flower and used it to wage conquering and deadly war upon each other. She also relates stories of courage and bravery in the face of the overwhelming power of those exploiting the power of this legendary plant.

Each of the stories told in The Spine of Night have clear cut ideals of good and evil and how power can corrupt even the biggest idealist. Betrayal is at the heart of a pair of the stories and the structure the storytelling does well to invest you into these short narratives quickly and never overstay their welcome. The stories are of epic battles and bloody violence and all of it feels like a massive heavy metal rock opera, in the best possible way.

The voice cast of The Spine of Night is superb with Lucy Lawless tapping the adventure gravitas of her Xena character to fit perfectly into the role of a warrior Queen of high ideals and morals. Patton Oswalt provides a wonderfully sleezy foil to Lawless as the feckless son of the actual conqueror of this realm whom we never see, he appears to have gifted this realm to his no-good son and Oswalt leans into the snotty entitlement of the character without slipping into parody.

I especially enjoyed the bold violence of The Spine of Night. If you’re going for epic fantasy battles, buckets of animated blood are a good way to underline the deathly seriousness of the story being told. Swords cut entire bodies in half, heads are lopped off and thrown, the forces of good and evil are left in boney and bloody tangles by massive flying rocks or split between the eyes by arrows fired with precision.

The distance from this violence offered by animation allows for it to be really cool to watch. The Spine of Night does violence in a way that would not work in a live action movie, strangely it would look too fake in a live action movie. In an animated realm however, the imagination is unrestrained by reality and the makers of The Spine of Night exploit that to a terrific degree. It’s a bloody, violent and exciting throwback story.

The Spine of Night will not be for everyone but fans of Heavy Metal, the animated classic or heavy metal music for that matter, dungeons and dragons fans, or even Lord of the Rings fans, will likely find a great deal to enjoy about the broad and epic adventures of The Spine of Night. The movie was written and directed by Phillip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King and you can sense a fanboy energy that is met with a genuine talent for this kind of strange animated story.

The Spine of Night debuted at the South by Southwest Festival and is now in the market for a distributor. Keep an eye out for it, I can’t imagine a distributor passing on the chance to distribute a movie with this much potential as a Midnight movie classic.