After fighting in the Crusades for three years, Dante rides back home to his family estate to reunite with his beloved Beatrice and his father. Dante sees a rider following him, but out of the blue, the man vanishes with no trace. When he arrives home, he sees the servants slaughtered, his father murdered and Beatrice near death. When her soul is going to the heaven, Lucifer takes Beatrice to hell, telling that Dante has betrayed her. Dante meets Virgil that guides him to hell, and the poet explains that Beatrice had bet with Lucifer that Dante would be faithful to her while in the holy war. In return, Lucifer would protect Dante and bring him back home safe and sound. In the arrival in hell, Dante learns that he needs to cross nine circles to reach Lucifer: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, the Tombs of Heresy in the City of Dis, Violence, Fraud and Treachery. In his painful journey, he discovers who doomed his family to suffering in hell.

"Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic" presents the journey of Dante to hell based on a video game and not on the poem of Dante Alighieri. The animation follows the Japanese style with few movements and is entertaining even for those that do not know the game. The screenplay is messy and in the end both Dante and his father deserve to be in hell since Dante is evil betraying his beloved Beatrice; slaughtering the prisoners in Jerusalem; permitting that his brother-in-law be blamed and hanged for his crime and his father is a brutal man abusive with his wife. However, Dante incoherently is able to save the souls of his mother and his beloved Beatrice using the cross she had given to him when she went to the Crusades. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Dante's Inferno"

Dante, a knight, returns from the crusades only to find that Something Bad Happened while he was gone. He goes to Hell, going through all nine levels(including the sewer one),engaging many creatures(most from other mythologies than the Christian one... and this *does* criticize the theology some, if I'd have liked it to do so to a greater extent)... fortunately for him, he can cut through most of them with his sword or a scythe... getting to the deepest one where the devil wants to marry his wife, because apparently even the lord of evil can't screw someone if there isn't a ring on that finger... hey, don't ask me. This is based on a game I've never played and barely know anything about. The voice acting is OK, but I wish they'd speak up, or turn the volume down on the otherwise good FX. It is fun, fast-paced, and has good action, except for when you can't tell the dimensions or where people are in relation to one another. Epic? Sure, if that doesn't require an actual story. The animation varies, partially because they keep changing who does it. There is a ton of bloody, gory violence and disturbing content and some nudity and sex in this. I recommend this to fans of bad-assery that has to do with religion in some way. 7/10

I quite enjoyed this animated feature version of Dante's Inferno (An Animated Epic, it says here modestly),but I wouldn't pretend that it was 100% successful. My knowledge of Dante's poem is sketchy, so I can't comment on how closely (or not) this film followed it. I'm even less familiar with the video game which gave rise to this so, again, I can't comment.

Taken on its own, the visuals are very striking - impressively so - but they suffer from the fact that multiple animation houses have been used. That was something which worked well in The Animatrix and Gotham Knight, where the standalone nature of the individual episodes facilitates - embraces, perhaps, a diversity of animation styles. Here, a switch of styles loses the continuity which a single narrative requires.

The voice performances are not well served by the script: both tend towards the melodramatic at worst and the merely functional at best.

Even so, if you are an animation fan and you have a leaning towards the fantastic (and the gory and the mildly sexual) you may well find there is a moderate amount to enjoy here.