The Tragedy of Man is one of the most triumphant pieces of art that I have ever seen. Functionally eternal in scope, limitless in imagination, and infinitely evolving and revolving, it’s no wonder that the 160-minute film took 23 years to complete. It’s lavish in the extreme, inventive in ways that I hadn’t even imagined that an animated film (or any film) could be, and is a fantastically layered text that could take half a dozen viewings to even get the full breadth and scope of it. Even for a film this long, it’s even more dense than you’re imagining, as the spoken dialogue comes at you quickly and at a pace that verges on relentless (and which is occasionally full of thous and thees). This is unsurprising if one considers that it’s based on an 1861 play by Hungarian aristocrat and author Imre Madách, which was itself based on a previous work of his, a dramatic poem that was about four thousand words long. It’s a tale as old as time, as it opens on a celestial scene in which Lucifer argues with God about creation, citing himself as the primeval spirit of negation, the shadow that must exist because of his Creator’s light. He claims that humanity will aspire to become gods themselves in time, and God gives Lucifer his share of the world, which takes the form of the twin trees of Knowledge and Immortality. 

You know how this story goes, and once the Fall occurs, Adam takes his first step into the apostasy of apotheosis by deciding that he will live on his own strength. As he and Eve find themselves living in a cave, he is never without Lucifer by his side, in various canine forms, man’s (false) best friend. Eventually, Adam demands that Lucifer follow through on the promised infinite Knowledge that he should have obtained from eating the fruit of temptation, so Lucifer does so by taking Adam on a spiritual journey that encompasses vast swaths of human history as Adam finds himself filling the role of various men of import throughout time. First is ancient Egypt, where Adam quantum leaps into Pharaoh Djoser in 2650 BC, where Eve takes the role of the wife of a slave who dies under the pharaoh’s demanding construction plans, with whom Djoser/Adam then falls in love, leading him to decide to abolish slavery. Lucifer, here appearing as Anubis in all of his dog-headed glory, tells him that history will still be a tapestry full of people enslaving one another, and that despite being as like a god as a man could be for that time, sand and time will reduce it all to nothing, and his proclamations of equality will change little, if anything. This will be the recurring theme of each of the time frames that Lucifer shows to Adam: mankind is on an eternal sinusoidal curve, and every time some kind of progress is made, it is inevitably corrupted because humans are savages at heart. 

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the above opening captures almost half a dozen different aesthetic art styles within those first plot developments. Lucifer and God’s conversation plays out in nebulous, colorful cosmos that represent all of existence and God’s permeation of every aspect of it, with Lucifer as a pure negative space within all of that firmament, like a silhouette animation. After the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve suddenly have hyperrealistic features, with everything being animated in a way that’s reminiscent of illustrated children’s books about cavemen. They’re honestly ugly to look at, and it works as an externalization of their fall from beings of perfected flesh to mortal meat. Much of the Egyptian segment is made up of flatly rendered images that evoke the stiff body language of hieroglyphic figures, but at other times it shows both the labor below and Djoser/Adam gazing upon it. And so, the art changes between (and within) different time periods, usually choosing and sticking to a color palette for each segment but not to one specific style. When Adam becomes Militiades in Greece during the 5th century BCE, the animation style takes on the appearance of the images emblazoned on Grecian pottery, and when he finds himself in first century Rome, gladiators battle it out in moving mosaics. The film never stops to let you catch your breath, and by the two-hour mark I was leaning forward in my seat in eager anticipation, metaphorically headlong. 

Eventually, Adam’s journey catches up to the life and times of Christ, and he (and Eve) reconnect with God through him, embracing his message of love and fraternity, but they then watch in disappointed horror as Adam, in the form of Crusader Tancred, watches as the message that seemed poised to save mankind from itself falls into sectarian violence and strategy, with a debate between two branches of Christianity in the midst of a schism morphing into the shapes of the churches that they represent, which bash against each other until nothing is left but blood and bricks. With Adam then embodying Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century (in a style of mostly monochromatic moving woodprints), it seems like scientific and rational progress will be the thing which leads humanity out of the darkness, only for Adam to then find himself in the stead of French Revolutionary figure Georges Danton, who is initially lauded for his anti-aristocratic stance but who finds himself executed when the mob considers him insufficiently radical. Adam finds himself wishing for a world in which society is organized along principles for the common good, and then he gets to see what that future will (or might) look like, in which all that remains of nature are the genetically modified beasts and flora and in which nations have been completely abolished. Of course, the end of nations has not meant the end of the state, as he learns quickly when he bears witness to a woman being severely punished when she refuses to hand her son over to the state for education and assignment to employment when he comes of age (he can’t be more than ten). Further in the future still, Adam is a giant floating in the void just beyond earth’s atmosphere, where machines arrive and replace his organic parts with mechanical ones that turn him into a humanoid spaceship, before he returns to see man’s end, in a distant ice age in which all that remains of Adam’s progeny are savages, but Lucifer argues that despite their bestial mutations, they are no different from humans of any other era, as people never fundamentally change. 

In all of these situations, Lucifer always brings Adam to the end of an age of progress, showing or implying the inevitable backward swing of the pendulum that (we hope) always bends in an arc toward justice. It’s arguable that this can’t be helped; he is, after all, the embodiment of shadow and obfuscation, and so there’s no purpose in showing Adam how democracy is born when he can instead reveal how it dies. That role falls to Eve, who likewise appears in every segment to be the voice of reason and hope for the future to counterpose the fatalistic nihilism that Lucifer is sowing into her husband’s mind. She’s the widowed slave whose love of Djoser ends slavery (at least for a time), both a guillotined aristocrat and a pro-Terror prostitute in Revolutionary France, the faithful wife of Militiades and the unfaithful wife of Kepler, and she is the woman who refuses to allow the state to essentially kidnap her child in the materialist future. The film’s a little trite and old fashioned in the way that it treats gender, as Adam (and therefore men) is always the historic actor while Eve (and thus women) exists to pull him back from the edge of the abyss, over and over again, but given that the source material predates the Transcontinental Railroad, it’s understandable. 

I can’t stress enough just what an amazing technical achievement this is. There are images from this that will stick with me forever. I can’t stop seeing the people of France dissolve into a great wave of red and blue that bears Danton/Adam aloft upon itself, or the shadow of the guillotine that is cast across his face. As the 20th century’s present comes into view, the endless gears of existence grind on, first as soldiers fall within the teeth of the cogs of the machine, followed by various pop culture figures as they replace the gods of eras past, and it feels like it could go on for the rest of time. And then it does. For all of its overt religiosity, there’s no denying that this is a monumental work of inarguable artistic relevance. At just under three hours, it’ll be a little while before I dig into it again, but I hope that it opens up for me even more when I find my way back to it again.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond