*All reviews contain spoilers*
Disclaimer: This blog is purely recreational and not for profit. Any material, including images and/or video footage, is property of their respective companies, unless stated otherwise. The author claims no ownership of this material. The opinions expressed therein reflect those of the author and are not to be viewed as factual documentation. All screencaps are from my own copy of the film.
Welcome to another entry in the First Thoughts series, guys! I know I promised that Roger would be coming up next, but after seeing the amount of notes I got for the film during research, I felt that it made more sense to save it for my week off at the end of the month. Instead, I wanted to tackle something a bit shorter, because my second job restarts this week and I’m about to be really busy again. This next entry in the series, The Tragedy of Man, is one of the more obscure ones, a Hungarian Biblical epic that spent decades in production before finally premiering in 2011.
The film was conceived and developed by Marcell Jankovics, who wrote the screenplay back in 1983. It was intended to be an adaptation of the 1861 play of the same name by Imre Madách, widely considered one of the most important works of Hungarian literature, which Jankovics felt would be ideally suited to the limitless medium of animation. In 1988, the film officially entered production at Hungary’s famous Pannonia Film Studio – Jankovics calculated that it would take roughly six years to make since a typical animated feature, which ran for about half the time his would, took an average of three. Oh, how wrong he was.
Unfortunately, the late 1980s were not a great time to be embarking on a project of this kind in Hungary. The Soviet Union was teetering on the brink of collapse, which had dramatic ramifications across Europe as the USSR lost its grip on its neighbours; the Eastern Bloc of socialist states, which included Hungary, began to disintegrate, culminating in the Rendszerváltás or “Regime change” of 1989, in which Hungary did away with communism altogether. This also affected the production model for Hungarian cinema, so barely a year into production, Jankovics suddenly found himself unable to rely on the state-funded system that he’d produced his earlier films under. To complete his epic, he would have to find alternative methods of funding.
Thus began a long period in which production progressed in fits and starts, with each of the film’s 15 segments (the same number as in the play) being financed and completed individually whenever opportunities allowed. After each one was finished, production would cease until further funding could be secured – apparently, the BBC rejected a funding request from Jankovics because the film was “too Hungarian”, which just goes to show the kind of absurdity he was facing in this uphill struggle. It sounds like a similar case to that of Richard Williams and his beloved Thief and the Cobbler (which we’ll be coming back to later this month); he, too, battled through decades of development hell to get his creation funded and completed, as did Paul Grimault for The King and the Mockingbird. While Jankovics’ production did not, thankfully, drag on for quite as long as those tortured projects, it still spanned an impressive 23 years!
One method Jankovics used to garner interest and secure financing was to exhibit some of the completed segments independently at film festivals or on Hungarian network Duna TV, but most of the film’s material was saved for the premiere. After 20 years, The Tragedy of Man got the final boost it needed in 2008, when the director’s 1974 short Sisyphus was featured in an American car commercial that was shown at the Super Bowl; the exposure led to further funding, followed at the last minute by a generous grant of 19.5 million Hungarian forint from the culture department of the Ministry of National Resources. The film ultimately cost around 600 million forint – about $2.5 million at the time of release – to create, but Jankovics was finally able to share his vision with the world in 2011, complete and uncompromised. (That said, he did have to redub a lot of the voice work for consistency, as many of the original actors had grown too old to play their parts).
In its final form, the film runs for a staggering 160 minutes, making it one of the longest animated features ever made (it’s almost half an hour longer than Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and Takahata’s Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which are also known for their great length). The fact that it’s hand-drawn only makes this more astonishing; it’s no wonder it took so long to finish when you consider the sheer labour it must have required. The first segment to be completed was “Space” in 1990, followed by “France/Revolution” in 1991, “Egypt/Stone and Sand” in 1992, “Phalanstery” and “Future Ice Age/Silence, Snow, Death” in 1993, both parts of “Prague” in 1996, “Creation” and “Ice Age” in 1997, “Outside the Garden of Eden/Awakening” in 1998, “Garden of Eden” in 1999, “Rome/Hercules at Crossroads” in 2000, “Greece/Democracy” in 2003, “Constantinople/Not One Iota” in 2006, and finally “London/Oh, Fortuna!” in 2009. Since the story concerns only a handful of significant figures, the cast is relatively small: Tibor Szilágyi, Mátyás Usztics, Ágnes Bertalan, Tamás Széles and Piroska Molnár play the key parts (I’m so glad I don’t have to read this aloud). For the music, Jankovics hired composer László Sáry, who provided his own score supported by classic works from the likes of Bach, Mussorgsky, Respighi and Wagner, which add an appropriate sense of grandeur to the proceedings.
The Tragedy of Man takes a philosophical approach to one of the oldest stories in the book – that is, the dawn of mankind and the Fall of Adam and Eve. Beginning as a debate between God and Lucifer about the latter’s rights to the world and the problems with humanity, we witness Lucifer’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, after which we begin a long journey with them through time. It’s something like Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), where the protagonist is guided through a series of events by a higher being and thus changes his perspective. Here, Adam’s objective is to puzzle out the meaning of life, that age old question that has haunted man since the beginning, though Lucifer’s influence is a pessimistic one to say the least. The film flirts with nihilism as it ponders whether humanity grows in wisdom with the passing centuries, or whether we are bound by the limitations of our nature to simply repeat the same mistakes over and over, drifting towards an inevitable doom.
It’s heavy stuff, but the presentation of Adam’s journey made it much more palatable for the history buff in me. You see, in each new period Lucifer takes him to, Adam dons a relevant incarnation as some historical figure, whose position in society affords him the opportunity of understanding the problems that beset people of the time. After starting out as a caveman, Adam is first taken to ancient Egypt and becomes Pharaoh Djoser in 2650 BCE, where a dalliance with Eve in the form of a slave woman teaches him some empathy – although Lucifer is quick to point out that such evils will recur in humanity’s future, rendering Adam’s abolishment of slavery futile. Next, they travel to ancient Greece, where Adam becomes Miltiades in 489 BCE and witnesses democracy in action, finding himself sentenced to death by the masses after they have been agitated against him. A decadent trip to ancient Rome in 67 CE ends with an encounter with Saint Peter, followed by Jesus and God himself, who reassures them with a message of love and fraternity. Further frustrations follow when Adam becomes Tancred, Prince of Galilee in 1096, as he is disgusted by the East-West Schism and the church’s pettiness while also pining for Eve, now locked inside a monastery.
As the film moves into the modern era, we find Adam incarnated as Johannes Kepler in Prague of 1608, where he is still seeking in vain for eternal wisdom while his wife has an affair (apparently, Kepler was the character Jankovics most identified with – given the context, I don’t like the implications of that). He also becomes Georges Danton in 1794, whom he is eventually executed as by the National Convention during the French Revolution – Eve, dolled up as an aristocrat in the vein of Marie Antoinette, joins him, in a nod to the accusations against the real Danton of being a royalist sympathiser. Adam is briefly jolted back into the body of Kepler at this point, before proceeding to Victorian London in 1897, this time as an unnamed, ordinary Englishman; while the wealth and invention on display initially impresses him, Lucifer points out that the society lacks depth and is overly concerned with material things. As always, Adam finds and courts Eve (who this time is in a higher social position than him), but with the arrival of World War I and further social unrest, Adam is left longing for a society ruled by scientific principles.
Lucifer thus grants his wish, whisking him off to a strange, dystopian future where all nations have been dissolved into a single, egalitarianist world state and conflict is dealt with swiftly and harshly. Adam finds the reality of his wishes much worse than he anticipated, disliking the cold, detached nature of this future humanity who have no cultural connections or identities to hold onto. Animals and plants have been commodified, with only the “useful” ones kept around to be genetically modified; all others have gone extinct. Adam soon finds that people in this Orwellian reality can be arrested for their very thoughts when he questions the materialism on display, then tries to defend Eve from the police when she refuses to hand over her child to the state machine. On the point of inciting a riot, Lucifer takes him even further, into a totally dehumanised future where Adam becomes a gigantic robot drifting through the cosmos. The experience unnerves him and he nearly loses his very spirit, but decides it’s better to keep striving back on Earth, thus symbolically accepting man’s struggle through his own acceptance of mortality.
The film wraps up with a vision of Earth in a distant ice age, in which the last fragments of humanity are dying, desperate and savage. Adam is horrified, but Lucifer tells him that these people are no different in nature from those of any earlier era. At this point, Adam wakes up back in his old caveman form in 50,000 BCE. Lucifer, ever one to cause trouble, convinces Adam that all human ambition is futile and pushes him to the brink of suicide in a last wretched attempt to gain control over his own life, but he is saved by Eve, who announces her pregnancy. God encourages Adam to keep his faith, so Adam decides to follow God’s word and accepts life’s struggle as an end in itself.
As I worked my way down the list towards The Tragedy of Man, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I’d heard almost nothing about it; the reason it made it onto the list in the first place was because of its great length (although it is surpassed by a handful of still longer films, with the record currently held by the 168-minute 2019 anime feature In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World, which is itself an extended cut of a shorter film). Having finally sat through it, I must admit that as artful and fascinating as it could be at times, it was rather a slog to get through – I’m not religious, so a lot of the theological themes were lost on me, and it ate up an entire afternoon.
Still, as an animation fan, how could I have anything but the utmost respect for this labour of love? It’s truly a mind-boggling achievement, with each segment not only painstakingly animated by hand, but all done in different artistic styles to reflect the contemporary art of the period the segment is set in (rather like what they did for the credits of WALL-E). You’ve got everything from cave art and hieroglyphics to geometrics and impressionism; the scratchy, woodcut illustrative style used for the Kepler scenes is especially impressive, given the complexity of the linework involved.
With the combination of art styles and prominent use of classical music, I couldn’t help being reminded strongly of Fantasia (1940) at times, with certain scenes also making me think of The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Yellow Submarine (1968), Hercules (1997) and The Prince of Egypt (1998). Given the similarities with Fantasia, I also found myself thinking of Allegro non troppo (1976) from earlier in this series, especially since that film concluded with its own Adam and Eve story set to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.
While this one may not have been quite as much fun as some of the earlier entries I’ve covered (I must admit to procrastinating with another viewing of Animal Farm), I’m still very glad that it got made. It’s wonderful to see an animation director fulfil his passion project the way he intended, especially when it becomes trapped in development hell for so long. The story may not be my cup of tea, but for any students of art or animation, I’d recommend this one for its visuals alone – the way Jankovics chooses to portray each individual time period is amazing, with endless little details to be discovered in every frame. It may require a good chunk of your time, but if you can find enough to spare, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed – you can find it on Netflix, or on YouTube for a small fee.
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you’ve found this interesting; Hungary has played such a crucial part in the animation industry over the years, and The Tragedy of Man is surely one of the country’s greatest animated triumphs. The next entry in the series will be Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I’ve heard lots of good things about, but before that I plan to finally get around to a combo post with my first thoughts on Soul and Raya. Roger Rabbit is now relegated to the end of this month, since I missed my April deadline (my apologies) – Enchanted will follow in June. Until next time, take care and staaay animated!
References
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47750602 – credit for poster
http://www.thefocuspull.com/features/fresh-look-the-tragedy-of-man-az-ember-tragediaja-2011/ – a balanced review of the film’s strengths and weaknesses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Man_(film) – Wiki page
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0176694/ – IMDB profile
Feeling Animated 