The Tragedy Of Man [Blu-ray]

The Tragedy Of Man Blu-ray presents the monumental animated epic from legendary Hungarian filmmaker Marcell Jankovics, a visionary work more than two decades in the making and one of the most ambitious achievements in the history of animation. Adapted from Imre Madách’s 19th-century dramatic poem, often compared to Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s Paradise Lost, this sweeping film charts the rise, collapse, and repetition of human civilization across time.

Beginning in the cosmic void, Lucifer — a shape-shifting, winged antagonist drawing from mythic figures like Anubis and the Devil — guides Adam and Eve through fifteen epochs of human history. Each era unfolds in a radically different visual style, blending world art, religious symbolism, folklore, and surreal abstraction into a constantly evolving animated tapestry. From the brutality of ancient Egypt and the fractured geometry of classical Greece to the decay of Rome, the dogma of the Middle Ages, and the anxieties of the modern world, one age dissolves into the next in a relentless meditation on power, faith, progress, and despair.

Across its shifting forms, The Tragedy Of Man is operatic, philosophical, and frequently overwhelming — a Bosch-like vision of humanity trapped in cycles of ambition and collapse, yet occasionally pierced by moments of beauty, grace, and fragile hope. Newly presented in its first-ever U.S. Blu-ray release by Deaf Crocodile, this edition offers a definitive presentation of Jankovics’s lifelong masterpiece.

directed by: marcell jankovics
starring: ágnes bertalan, mátyás usztics, tibor szilágyi
2011 / 160 min

Language: Hungarian
Audio: stereo
Discs: 1