Though adult animation has made huge progress in earning critical and commercial acclaim in the West the past couple of decades, it is still mostly associated with comedies like “South Park” and “Rick and Morty.” Rest assured, you won’t mistake “The Spine of Night” for a comedy.
READ MORE: ‘The Spine Of Night’ Is Blood-Soaked Animated Eye Candy [SXSW Review]
Instead, this hand-rotoscoped animated, high-fantasy film mostly resembles the hyper-violent animated films of Ralph Bakshi from the late ’70s and early ’80s; films with elaborate worlds, kingdoms in peril, ancient evils awakening, and heroes ready to stand up for what’s right in epic, bloody battles.
Animated over the course of seven years by a small team led by “Europa Report” screenwriter Philip Gelatt and animator Morgan Galen King, and featuring a stellar voice cast that includes Lucy Lawless, Richard E. Grant, Patton Oswalt, and others, “The Spine of Night” is one of the most unique films to have premiered in the Midnighters section of SXSW in recent years. Shortly after the film’s world premiere, Gelatt and King spoke on the phone about the arduous process of making “The Spine of Night,” as well as bringing back a decades-old animation technique and breaking unfortunate fantasy tropes.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2021
What drew you to make this film using rotoscope animation? It feels like using that as the main technique for a feature film, it has all but disappeared in the US.
Morgan Galen King: That was the plan from the very beginning, almost like it couldn’t not be that, in order to capture the magic of ’80s fantasy animated films. Even though it hasn’t been used much in the last 30 years, when I was a kid it was everywhere. You could see it in the films of Ralph Bakshi, and on TV with “He-Man,” and the far less-remembered “Thundarr the Barbarian” if anyone remembers that. So that was just all the stuff I grew up with, and I always felt like that microcosm of rotoscope animation had so much more potential for storytelling and aesthetic exploration, and it was a shame that it didn’t last longer. So we knew from very early on that we wanted to tell an adult animated story that evoked that era visually. So it pretty much just had to be rotoscoped.
The downside of doing rotoscope animation is that it takes so long. We’ve been working on this movie for seven years, and with a team that was very small compared to how it would have been done back when Bakshi was doing it, I think he probably had more than a hundred animators depending on the project. Our team was never more than four people on the animation side, then a couple of colorists and several background painters for the duration of the animation production. So it was a very small team and it took us several years, so I guess there’s a proportionality there.
Speaking of Ralph Bakshi, there seemed to be a lot of ‘Fire and Ice’ in the look and direction of this film. What was it about Bakshi’s work and that moment in time that was appealing enough to influence ‘The Spine of Night’?
MGK: I don’t remember when we first talked about making this movie, but we invariably started talking about John Milius‘ “Conan the Barbarian” movie because we love it and it’s amazing. That movie has a fantasy setting, with bigger ideas and corners that aren’t fleshed out but instead are left to your imagination, and generally feels like a big sprawling world that the books sort of condense. So that influenced the tone of what we wanted to do, and then visually we looked at Ralph Bakshi films of the late ’70s and early ’80s and, of course, “Heavy Metal” was a formative film for me as a young man. They had a sense of physicality I always found appealing because they used all the imagination of animation but still made it feel constrained by human limits. It’s like it exists between cartoony-animation and live-action.
I noticed that Betty Gabriel’s character was the only one that resembled their voice performer, can you talk about what led to that decision?
Philip Gelatt: The way rotoscoping works is that first, we shot a live-action version of the movie, right? We did basically the entire thing, with one exception, that we didn’t have our name cast. There’s a version of this movie that is motion reference, with performers we will reference in the animation, and then many, many years later, after the animation was much more advanced, that’s when we went out and cast Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt and the others. We weren’t going to drag Joe Manganiello or Richard E. Grant into a warehouse seven years ago for the motion reference, but despite that, the characters still do resemble the voice actors a bit.
As you say, the one person that resembles their character is Betty Gabriel, because we actually shot original motion reference with her, and then brought her back to do voice acting. I think she had just graduated from drama school, and then came and did the live-action footage from us. Then she went on to be in “Get Out” and years later was when she re-did the audio for us.
The film has a sort of anthology format to it, spanning cultures and times we don’t normally see in fantasy, what led to that decision?
MGK: From the inception, we really wanted to make sure that the world of the film encompassed people of color and cultures that reflect our world, because when it’s a fantasy world there’s no reason for it to not be that way. Especially when it’s animation, you could pick at any skin tone and you can draw any hairstyle. There’s no built-in reason for the fantasy genre to be all white and homogenous except for just systemic imperialism. So it was really exciting to not only tell this style of story, but to break some of the really bad traditions that were baked into the genre.
PG: That was a running creative guidepost, to try and make an epic adult fantasy film that you didn’t have to make excuses for liking. That you didn’t need to go, “oh well, it does sort of oversexualize the women” or “yes, they are just all white people.” The goal was very much to take everything we loved about the genre and move it forward and leave the things that we didn’t love about it behind, in the hope of making something that would speak more to the 21st century while feeling dug up from the past in other ways.
You introduce some interesting concepts in the film, particularly your version of magic. How much did you want to explain about how it worked versus leaving it open-ended?
MGK: That’s something we thought long and hard about, how much detail we want to infer to give a sense of the bigger world. That’s the thing I really loved about the original “Star Wars” trilogy, feeling like every background character had their own story. Even though they have told those stories in the past 40 years, but when I was a kid and those stories hadn’t been told, we thought Boba Fett could be anybody. So we wanted to specifically create a world with enough substance to latch onto and to feel that it was part of something bigger without explicitly over detailing it with like family genealogies and detailed maps of every location, but to let it be in the realm of the imagination.
Even though it took quite a while to get this movie out, would you consider revisiting this world, whether in film or another format?
PG: I don’t know if I could do another seven-year project [laughs], but we’ve certainly talked about ideas. If the opportunity and the interest were there, there are ideas that we could pursue.
You can follow along with the rest of our 2021 SXSW coverage here.
