You’d think presenting Mount Everest, the God of the Sky, Earth’s tallest mountain and one of its deadliest, through hand-drawn animation would make the landscape look less forbidding and not more. Patrick Imbert’s new movie, “The Summit of the Gods,” planes away Everest’s intimidating features, like sharp rock faces captured via telephoto lenses, and flattens the bedrock colossus to fit his medium; in the process, the mountain gains new sobriety. It is as haunting to behold on screen as it is formidable to ascend in real life, but in real life, at least, Everest has weight. You can pierce it with an ice ax and tread on it with crampons, though you may die along the journey. In “The Summit of the Gods,” Everest is a ghost.
Ghosts kill, too, and Imbert, adapting Jirô Taniguchi’s 2000-2003 manga series, itself an adaptation of Baku Yumemakura’s 1998 novel, uses simplicity to center Everest as a natural graveyard. The mountain is a challenge, too, and that challenge provides “The Summit of the Gods” with its plot motivation. Told largely through flashbacks in its first half before catching up with the present, the film follows Imbert’s narrator, Fukamachi (Damien Boisseau), a photojournalist in pursuit of a camera that may or may not have belonged to George Mallory, the very real mountaineer who vanished into literal thin air on his 1953 attempt at ascending Everest. It’s a fool’s errand, but the fool winds up on the trail of Habu (Eric Herson-Macarel), a mountaineer driven to greatness whatever the cost. He, too, means to ascend Everest. He might also have the camera.
The one-two combination is catnip for Fukamachi, likewise driven not to greatness, but by discovery (which the movie suggests is its own kind of greatness). “The Summit of the Gods” is nominally about a perilous trek to Everest’s peak, and being a sports movie, it is beholden to the genre’s rules. Imbert leads viewers along the same path that thousands have followed and several hundred have died on, and his animation team mines pristine beauty out of Everest’s countless dangers. For anybody in the audience who has climbed Everest, the renderings probably don’t compare; for all us scaredy cats content to look at .jpegs or pictures in magazines, they’re breathtaking.
Imbert tends to prefer clean aesthetics, whether working as an animation director (in “April and the Extraordinary World,” “Ernest and Celestine”) or a supervising animator (“The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales,” to which he also contributed a pair of shorts). “The Summit of the Gods” is his first time handing the animation reins over to others and serving as réalisateur, but that necessarily means his artistic sensibilities spill over into the frame. His animation department keeps the images uncluttered and unaffected; there’s realism in each drawing that’s complemented by a lively spark, as if the lines waywardly try doing their own thing until the animators guide them where they must go. That’s the great joy of traditional animation: It captures the spirit of the creator in ways 3D animation plainly can’t.
For a movie like “The Summit of the Gods,” that unpredictability is key. As Fukamachi slowly, inexorably gravitates toward Habu, no matter how hard Habu tries to avoid him, the story inches closer and closer toward convention. Convention is a real king bummer. “The Summit of the Gods,” refusing to be a king bummer, benefits from the animation’s caprice: Without needing to explicitly raise the question, Imbert is able to suggest that, perhaps, the outcome of Habu’s expedition and Fukamachi’s stubborn accompaniment isn’t preordained. Perhaps there is no glory to be found at Everest’s peak. If there is, the price tag might be higher than anyone, even other devoted mountaineers, may be willing to put up, because what’s the use of glory if nobody will be able to acknowledge it? If not for the record books and fame, why climb at all?
Why photograph, either? What the hell are Habu and Fukamachi doing? “The Summit of the Gods” makes these concerns its heart. Everest is just a conceit. It’s the reason for making the movie in the first place, which might explain why Imbert and his animators go so hard to make Everest tangible. Ultimately the mountain becomes a character in its own right; it is implacable and doesn’t have an arc, but it has emotions, as everything in nature does, and such massive influence over the narrative that Habu and Fukamachi’s stoic will crumbles like the facade it is. They’re helpless. They’re nearly defenseless, too. All they have to save themselves is Habu’s years of experience climbing other mountains and failing to climb Everest. No amount of gear, or supplies, can save them if Everest is in the mood to kill them.
There’s an ease to “The Summit of the Gods’” craftsmanship and evocation of Everest’s endless hazards and death traps that frankly makes other Everest-set movies, even the good ones, look like rows of clown shoes. “Everest,” that 2015 lumbering biographical “adventure” movie, fares particularly poorly in the comparison; movies about hubris are ill-suited by internal hubris of their own. What Imbert has done here, some years down the line, may solidify “The Summit of the Gods,” a work of fiction, as one of the greatest Everest films ever made. If nothing else it’s the Everest film that respects the mountain best. [A-]
“The Summit of the Gods” hits select theaters on November 24 before hitting Netflix on November 30.