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Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic is a direct to DVD animated dark fantasy action film released on February 9, 2010. The film is based on Dante’s Inferno video game (walk) which is itself loosely based on Dante’s Inferno.
imdb / live action film / 178
timespace coordinates: island off the west coast of Scotland in 1846 (Eilean Shona)
timespace coordinates: 922 A.D Kievan Rus’ > Scandinavia
The 13th Warrior is a 1999 American historical fiction action film based on Michael Crichton‘s novel Eaters of the Dead, which is a loose retelling of the tale of Beowulf combined with Ahmad ibn Fadlan‘s historical account of the Volga Vikings. It stars Antonio Banderas as Ahmad ibn Fadlan, as well as Diane Venora and Omar Sharif. It was directed by John McTiernan. Crichton directed some reshoots uncredited. (wiki)
“Atmospheric, great sets and costumes, but thin plot.” (rt)
Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North
timespace coordinates: AD 1081 Kingdom_of_Castile
Maldita Castilla, known in North America and PAL regions as Cursed Castilla, is an arcade action video game developed by Locomalito and released in December 2012. The game is primarily based on myths from Spain and, to a smaller degree, other parts of Europe. Maldita Castilla was developed as a tribute to Ghosts’n Goblins. The game was inspired by Amadis of Gaul, a sixteenth-century Spanish chivalric romance.
The game can be downloaded for free from the website of its author, Juan Antonio Becerra aka “Locomalito” – https://www.locomalito.com/maldita_castilla.php
timespace coordinates: late 8th century at the border of Helheim
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a dark fantasy action-adventure game developed and published by the British video game development studio Ninja Theory. Self-described as an “independent AAA game“, it was created by a team of approximately twenty developers led by writer and director Tameem Antoniades.
Inspired by Norse mythology and Celtic culture, Hellblade follows Senua, a Pict warrior who must make her way to Helheim by defeating otherworldly entities and facing their challenges, in order to rescue the soul of her dead lover from the goddess Hela. In parallel, the game acts as a metaphor for the character’s struggle with psychosis, as Senua, who suffers from the condition but believes it to be a curse, is haunted by an entity known as the “Darkness”, voices in her head known as “Furies”, and memories from her past. To properly represent psychosis, developers worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people suffering from the condition.
The game blends several genres, including hack and slash, puzzle solving, and psychological horror. Voice acting is an integral part of the game, while its cutscenes combine motion capture by Melina Juergens, and live action performances by other actors. (wiki)
Nicholas Kalmakoff (wiki) via butdoesitfloat “In 1955, a Russian émigré died alone, unknown and in poverty at the hôpital de Lagny to the north of Paris. After leading a hermit’s existence in his small room at the hotel de la Rochefoucault in Paris, this former Russian aristocrat had created a fascinating body of work which, deemed eccentric and worthless, was locked away in storage and forgotten.”
timespace coordinates: 9th century Ireland
The Secret of Kells is a 2009 French-Belgian-Irish animated fantasy film animated by Cartoon Saloon directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey.
The film is based on the story of the origin of the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament located in Dublin, Ireland.
It also draws upon Celtic mythology; examples include its inclusion of Crom Cruach, a pre-Christian Irish deity and the reference to the poetic genre of Aislings, in which a poet is confronted by a dream or vision of a seeress, in the naming of the forest sprite encountered by Brendan. Wider mythological similarities have also been commented upon, such as parallels between Brendan’s metaphysical battle with Crom Cruach and Beowulf‘s underwater encounter with Grendel’s mother.
The Secret of Kells began development in 1999, when Tomm Moore and several of his friends were inspired by Richard Williams’s The Thief and the Cobbler, Disney’s Mulan and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, which based their visual style on the respective traditional art of the cultures featured in each film. They decided to do something similar to Studio Ghibli‘s films but with Irish art. Tomm Moore explained that the visual style was inspired by Celtic and medieval art, being ‘flat, with false perspective and lots of colour’. Even the clean up was planned to ‘obtain the stained glass effect of thicker outer lines’. (wiki)
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