Dante's Inferno: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

Dante Alighieri

Nob 2024 · Abrams

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Acclaimed French animators Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi adapt Dante’s literary classic Inferno in the sweeping, dramatic style that brought The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Fantasia 2000 to life

Literary aficionados will appreciate this decadent graphic novel adaptation, which does not seek to sand down the source material. Likewise, adults whose imaginations were fueled by films like Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame as children, which the Brizzi brothers animated sequences for, will be swept up in this lushly illustrated adult fable, unfettered by the demands of corporate animation studios.

Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante crosses the nine circles of Hell to find his beloved, Beatrice, in Paradise. Along the way, he must recognize and reject each of the incarnations of sin. In each circle of Hell, Dante confronts both sinners and demons, from Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, and Paris, whose loves were famously their downfall, to the Greek Furies and Medusa, to heretics like Epicurus, whose teachings claimed that the soul died with the body, now forced to writhe in a flaming tomb for eternity.

Each layer of Hell reveals monsters, gods, historical and mythological kings, philosophers, queens, and hordes of the miserable, faceless damned, all culminating in a confrontation with Lucifer himself.

Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi make this famously dense literary classic accessible without distorting it and betraying the spirit of the Italian genius. They deftly translate it into comics while taking care to preserve the heart of the story: a taste for excess, dramatic tension, and the inevitable darkness of the subject matter.

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Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and politician active between the 13th and 14th centuries. His magnum opus is The Divine Comedy, a poetic saga where, guided by the Roman poet Virgil, he travels through Hell and Purgatory to seek his love, Beatrice, in Paradise. Dante was exiled from his hometown of Florence for speaking out against the corruption of the church, and his political endeavors became secondary to his literary and philosophical work in exile. Dante is considered the first of the “three crowns” of Italian literature, the other two being Boccaccio and Petrarch. The work of Dante Alighieri is seen as a literary bridge between the divine focus of medieval literature and the human focus of the Renaissance. Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi are twin brothers born and raised in Paris. They studied at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs, where their passion for film and fine art led them to study animation. During the course of their nearly 50-year-long career, they have received the Ministry of French Culture’s Prix de Rome, an arts residency at the Villa Medici, the title of Chevaliers de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of French Culture, and nationwide acclaim for their literary graphic novel adaptations in France. They have worked as animators, sequence directors, and storyboard artists on such animated films as Fantasia 2000, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Salma Hayek–produced animated adaptation of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, and more.