THE SPINE OF NIGHT is one of the best film surprises of the year. A throwback to the days of feature-length adult animated fare by the likes of Ralph Bakshi; this hyper-violent and deeply meditative fantasy saga is a love letter to classic rotoscope animation and pulp adventure stories that will be cherished by anyone who is open to its strange and macabre sensibilities.
The film is also the result of a nearly decade-long collaboration between animator Morgan Galen King and writer Philip Gelatt (Netflix’s LOVE, DEATH, & ROBOTS). I had the pleasure of speaking with the pair in the days leading up to the film’s release and I took the opportunity to ask them all about the origins and hard work that led to the stellar achievement that is THE SPINE OF NIGHT!
_____________________________
Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt
As we begin, I just want to say I loved the film but for you both to tackle this kind of project was a crazy endeavor. How did all this madness get started?
[Morgan Galen King] – You have to be a little deranged, I think, in retrospect. It’s a huge process. I remember when we were about a year into animating this, I was at a coffee shop with my wife. There was a bookshelf next to where you’re waiting to get your coffee brought out. There was a book on different kinds of animation. I was like, “Oh, I wonder if there’s a rotoscoping section.” I flipped to that. The opening sentence was, “Don’t attempt a feature length rotoscope film unless you’re serving a very long prison sentence.”
[Laughs]
[Morgan Galen King] – I was like, “Oh, well, we’re really in it now.” But I’ve been doing short films for a couple of years. Just teaching myself the style. I always loved it. When I wanted to get back into making new films, something I hadn’t really been able to do since college, I had decades of graphic design experience and I was like, “How can I funnel this into what am I doing?” When I thought back on what I wanted to see in the world, it was rotoscope fantasy animation. When I made my third short, EXORDIUM, it made its way around the internet a little bit and found its way into Phil’s inbox at some point.
[Philip Gelatt] – So I saw EXORDIUM and I thought to myself, “This is what I should be making because it’s everything that I love.” It’s funny, a number of people have called us crazy, and maybe we are crazy. But that was part of the pleasure of this project was to make something that, with a reasonable amount of confidence, I can say nobody else would make. Nobody else would endeavor something quite so nutty. That to me, it’s all more reason from my perspective to do it and to stick with it and to get it done.
THE SPINE OF NIGHT has such a vast story told clearly in a short runtime. Walk me through the creative process of condensing such a big world and narrative into a ninety-minute feature.
[Morgan Galen King] – The Ur-text of my childhood was the Walter M. Miller Jr. Sci-fi book, “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. It should be a more well-known cult classic and would be if it had ever been adapted. So, I was thinking of that book and how it does these century-long time jumps between each section. Imagining what could exist in that world and what could have happened in the time between those windows gives the audience so much opportunity to make their own myths and imagine what could be filling in all those corners. We wanted to approach THE SPINE OF NIGHT sort of like that so that there was a lot of room for audience interpretation and imagination in the same way that the monster you don’t see in the horror film, the scarier it is when you do see it. So, we leave the corners dark enough to imagine a bigger world beyond what we actually put on screen. I think that was always the intent to make the world feel even bigger than what we were showing.
[Philip Gelatt] – It was really tricky. I think even to the very end of the animation process, we were finessing questions like, “Oh, should we put intertitles at the beginning of each chapter? What exactly should the voiceover be saying to help make sure that audiences can follow along?” Without doing too much audience handholding, because I really like to respect the audience’s intelligence and assume that they can keep up. You want to make sure the breadcrumbs are there, but you also don’t want to hit them over the head with it. It is a really delicate creative process for sure.
I find it really refreshing. There’s been such a strong movement in recent pop culture to over explain every element of a story. It’s a nice change of pace to let the audience draw their own conclusions and fill in the gaps. That approach used to be so much more commonplace. I really enjoyed that the film’s narrative lets your imagination run wild.
[Morgan Galen King] – Thank you. That’s awesome to hear!
Was there anything that you wanted to explore story or character wise that you didn’t get a chance to as the film took shape? Something you loved but had to jettison due to pacing or it not fitting the narrative?
[Morgan Galen King] –I think any film’s going to have a little bit of that. The only thing I really missed was that the original rough cut, since we filmed it all live action first to do the rotoscoping, we had a full cut of the film that you could watch if you used a lot of imagination. In the final chapter of the film, where the city is under siege, we had a wonderful montage that began with a guy dying… it was similar to the Æon Flux pilot – bleeding out and having the memories flash by. Then we’re seeing the last night of what everyone was doing in that city. You see all the characters make their decision for their final night anticipating death.
It is a really cool sequence where we saw a lot of aspects of that last city. But when you got to the last chapter of the film, it was like, “do we need another 12 minutes of world-building when we’re going to fly away from this place anyway?” So, I missed that. It was like the French plantation scene in APOCALYPSE NOW. It would’ve been great, but it killed the momentum. That was the most painful thing we cut. The other thing that just would’ve been rad that we had to cut out was in the original version of the movie at the very first scene. It’s not just Tzod walking up the mountain alone, she’s with animals. She’s riding a bear and there’s a heron following her and a snake at her heels. Then as she’s slowly climbing the mountain, the animals die off. So, she finally reaches the top she’s by herself, but that was cut for scope reasons, basically. We just couldn’t get it done. It’s a cool visual that I miss.
Tell me about your collaborative process. How do you two create together? I imagine when Morgan was making short films that it was very much a solo operation. How did Philip coming in change that?
[Morgan Galen King] – Well for me, it was an absolute dream because I’d had a few actors working in the previous rotoscoping things to help with live-action direction and sound editing. But on the early projects, it really was just me working alone. The opportunity to have someone like Phil who has so much experience working on his own live-action films and other animated arenas, and just so aesthetically sympathetic for what I was already doing, that it just made everything bigger and better. It was for me an absolutely perfect collaboration. I think it’s the sort of thing you spend your whole life hoping you’ll find someone you can make something with without any restraints where you’re almost always on the same page. It was great.
[Philip Gelatt] – I was going to make the joke that Morgan’s a nightmare, but I won’t even make the joke. It was great. Every movie really is a work of collaborators. So as Morgan says, it’s very rare to find people where you’re almost entirely on the same page. Even when you’re not exactly on the same page, you know you’re both coming from the same perspective as to what you’re making. So, the process was … I can’t think of a single hiccup, that we had really. It was as smooth as one would hope. It’s been really great.
There are so many interesting designs in the film. What were some of the inspirations for the different looks and settings?
[Morgan Galen King] – Well, it’s super hard to know where a lot of it comes from. I think a lot of the guardian and gatekeeper designs have some origins in, I don’t know, it’s so old now, but right when the first Dark Souls came out. I loved all those, the bronze helmets and big swords and stuff. I’m sure that played a part. But in general, I think it’s just a lifetime of reading fantasy comics and flipping through fantasy art and all that. We had a very conscious thought that it should mirror the jumps through time and that we would try to keep design elements from the beginning and just keep moving them full forward. You can really see it in the armies’ armor and stuff as it modernizes, which I try to retain design themes throughout. But the origins of it, the ether, I guess. I’m sure there’s all sorts of early Star Wars, things like the …Oh, I don’t know…
[Philip Gelatt] – The only specific thing I remember is talking about in the design process was Jack Kirby, actually. I don’t think there’s a ton of Jack Kirby in the movie. But well, you do see it, I think, is in the design of the, whatever you want to call it, “The Sons”, the original gods. From a certain angle it’s very Kirby, I think.
What is the one aspect of THE SPINE OF NIGHT that you are the proudest of?
[Philip Gelatt] – For me, it’s the scene where, Dae and Gull, the two young lovers are laying around the campfire after their city’s been razed. Just thinking about their place in the universe. I wrote it pretty explicitly with myself and my wife in mind. That whole part’s kind of a love letter to her. So that part means a lot to me.
[Morgan Galen King] – For me, I have to say the thing I’m most proud of is just, a cop-out answer, but it’s the whole thing, the totality of it. It is so rare to be able to make a project that you can say at the end was untampered with. It is purely exactly what we wanted to do. So, to manage that, even at a great expanse of time is really an accomplishment that I’m very proud of. So yeah. The Lovers are good too, but I think the whole thing
You two have every reason to be extremely proud of what you’ve created. It’s a wonderful film. So, to wrap up; are we going to see any more rotoscope animation projects from you guys in the future?
[Morgan Galen King] – We’ve had seven years to really think about all of these characters and the world, and there’s certainly been notes jotted down, outlines sketched out. I always find it kind of obnoxious when people over promise this huge expansive world based on just their one unreleased film. But I think if the appetite was there, if people really wanted it, I think we’d find a way to get something made.
THE SPINE OF NIGHT is currently in select theaters, as well as on digital, and on-demand.
Matthew Essary has been a professional film critic since 2017 and a film fanatic for much longer.
Currently residing in Nashville, TN, he also co-hosts the film podcast "Video Culture" (available on all podcast platforms). He can be reached at "WheelsCritic@gmail.com" and on Twitter: @WheelsCritic
Talking Through The Night: A Conversation With The Creators Behind THE SPINE OF NIGHT
November 2, 2021
THE SPINE OF NIGHT is one of the best film surprises of the year. A throwback to the days of feature-length adult animated fare by the likes of Ralph Bakshi; this hyper-violent and deeply meditative fantasy saga is a love letter to classic rotoscope animation and pulp adventure stories that will be cherished by anyone who is open to its strange and macabre sensibilities.
(Read FCS’s full review of the film HERE)
The film is also the result of a nearly decade-long collaboration between animator Morgan Galen King and writer Philip Gelatt (Netflix’s LOVE, DEATH, & ROBOTS). I had the pleasure of speaking with the pair in the days leading up to the film’s release and I took the opportunity to ask them all about the origins and hard work that led to the stellar achievement that is THE SPINE OF NIGHT!
_____________________________
As we begin, I just want to say I loved the film but for you both to tackle this kind of project was a crazy endeavor. How did all this madness get started?
[Morgan Galen King] – You have to be a little deranged, I think, in retrospect. It’s a huge process. I remember when we were about a year into animating this, I was at a coffee shop with my wife. There was a bookshelf next to where you’re waiting to get your coffee brought out. There was a book on different kinds of animation. I was like, “Oh, I wonder if there’s a rotoscoping section.” I flipped to that. The opening sentence was, “Don’t attempt a feature length rotoscope film unless you’re serving a very long prison sentence.”
[Laughs]
[Morgan Galen King] – I was like, “Oh, well, we’re really in it now.” But I’ve been doing short films for a couple of years. Just teaching myself the style. I always loved it. When I wanted to get back into making new films, something I hadn’t really been able to do since college, I had decades of graphic design experience and I was like, “How can I funnel this into what am I doing?” When I thought back on what I wanted to see in the world, it was rotoscope fantasy animation. When I made my third short, EXORDIUM, it made its way around the internet a little bit and found its way into Phil’s inbox at some point.
[Philip Gelatt] – So I saw EXORDIUM and I thought to myself, “This is what I should be making because it’s everything that I love.” It’s funny, a number of people have called us crazy, and maybe we are crazy. But that was part of the pleasure of this project was to make something that, with a reasonable amount of confidence, I can say nobody else would make. Nobody else would endeavor something quite so nutty. That to me, it’s all more reason from my perspective to do it and to stick with it and to get it done.
THE SPINE OF NIGHT has such a vast story told clearly in a short runtime. Walk me through the creative process of condensing such a big world and narrative into a ninety-minute feature.
[Morgan Galen King] – The Ur-text of my childhood was the Walter M. Miller Jr. Sci-fi book, “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. It should be a more well-known cult classic and would be if it had ever been adapted. So, I was thinking of that book and how it does these century-long time jumps between each section. Imagining what could exist in that world and what could have happened in the time between those windows gives the audience so much opportunity to make their own myths and imagine what could be filling in all those corners. We wanted to approach THE SPINE OF NIGHT sort of like that so that there was a lot of room for audience interpretation and imagination in the same way that the monster you don’t see in the horror film, the scarier it is when you do see it. So, we leave the corners dark enough to imagine a bigger world beyond what we actually put on screen. I think that was always the intent to make the world feel even bigger than what we were showing.
[Philip Gelatt] – It was really tricky. I think even to the very end of the animation process, we were finessing questions like, “Oh, should we put intertitles at the beginning of each chapter? What exactly should the voiceover be saying to help make sure that audiences can follow along?” Without doing too much audience handholding, because I really like to respect the audience’s intelligence and assume that they can keep up. You want to make sure the breadcrumbs are there, but you also don’t want to hit them over the head with it. It is a really delicate creative process for sure.
I find it really refreshing. There’s been such a strong movement in recent pop culture to over explain every element of a story. It’s a nice change of pace to let the audience draw their own conclusions and fill in the gaps. That approach used to be so much more commonplace. I really enjoyed that the film’s narrative lets your imagination run wild.
[Morgan Galen King] – Thank you. That’s awesome to hear!
Was there anything that you wanted to explore story or character wise that you didn’t get a chance to as the film took shape? Something you loved but had to jettison due to pacing or it not fitting the narrative?
[Morgan Galen King] –I think any film’s going to have a little bit of that. The only thing I really missed was that the original rough cut, since we filmed it all live action first to do the rotoscoping, we had a full cut of the film that you could watch if you used a lot of imagination. In the final chapter of the film, where the city is under siege, we had a wonderful montage that began with a guy dying… it was similar to the Æon Flux pilot – bleeding out and having the memories flash by. Then we’re seeing the last night of what everyone was doing in that city. You see all the characters make their decision for their final night anticipating death.
It is a really cool sequence where we saw a lot of aspects of that last city. But when you got to the last chapter of the film, it was like, “do we need another 12 minutes of world-building when we’re going to fly away from this place anyway?” So, I missed that. It was like the French plantation scene in APOCALYPSE NOW. It would’ve been great, but it killed the momentum. That was the most painful thing we cut. The other thing that just would’ve been rad that we had to cut out was in the original version of the movie at the very first scene. It’s not just Tzod walking up the mountain alone, she’s with animals. She’s riding a bear and there’s a heron following her and a snake at her heels. Then as she’s slowly climbing the mountain, the animals die off. So, she finally reaches the top she’s by herself, but that was cut for scope reasons, basically. We just couldn’t get it done. It’s a cool visual that I miss.
Tell me about your collaborative process. How do you two create together? I imagine when Morgan was making short films that it was very much a solo operation. How did Philip coming in change that?
[Morgan Galen King] – Well for me, it was an absolute dream because I’d had a few actors working in the previous rotoscoping things to help with live-action direction and sound editing. But on the early projects, it really was just me working alone. The opportunity to have someone like Phil who has so much experience working on his own live-action films and other animated arenas, and just so aesthetically sympathetic for what I was already doing, that it just made everything bigger and better. It was for me an absolutely perfect collaboration. I think it’s the sort of thing you spend your whole life hoping you’ll find someone you can make something with without any restraints where you’re almost always on the same page. It was great.
[Philip Gelatt] – I was going to make the joke that Morgan’s a nightmare, but I won’t even make the joke. It was great. Every movie really is a work of collaborators. So as Morgan says, it’s very rare to find people where you’re almost entirely on the same page. Even when you’re not exactly on the same page, you know you’re both coming from the same perspective as to what you’re making. So, the process was … I can’t think of a single hiccup, that we had really. It was as smooth as one would hope. It’s been really great.
There are so many interesting designs in the film. What were some of the inspirations for the different looks and settings?
[Morgan Galen King] – Well, it’s super hard to know where a lot of it comes from. I think a lot of the guardian and gatekeeper designs have some origins in, I don’t know, it’s so old now, but right when the first Dark Souls came out. I loved all those, the bronze helmets and big swords and stuff. I’m sure that played a part. But in general, I think it’s just a lifetime of reading fantasy comics and flipping through fantasy art and all that. We had a very conscious thought that it should mirror the jumps through time and that we would try to keep design elements from the beginning and just keep moving them full forward. You can really see it in the armies’ armor and stuff as it modernizes, which I try to retain design themes throughout. But the origins of it, the ether, I guess. I’m sure there’s all sorts of early Star Wars, things like the …Oh, I don’t know…
[Philip Gelatt] – The only specific thing I remember is talking about in the design process was Jack Kirby, actually. I don’t think there’s a ton of Jack Kirby in the movie. But well, you do see it, I think, is in the design of the, whatever you want to call it, “The Sons”, the original gods. From a certain angle it’s very Kirby, I think.
What is the one aspect of THE SPINE OF NIGHT that you are the proudest of?
[Philip Gelatt] – For me, it’s the scene where, Dae and Gull, the two young lovers are laying around the campfire after their city’s been razed. Just thinking about their place in the universe. I wrote it pretty explicitly with myself and my wife in mind. That whole part’s kind of a love letter to her. So that part means a lot to me.
[Morgan Galen King] – For me, I have to say the thing I’m most proud of is just, a cop-out answer, but it’s the whole thing, the totality of it. It is so rare to be able to make a project that you can say at the end was untampered with. It is purely exactly what we wanted to do. So, to manage that, even at a great expanse of time is really an accomplishment that I’m very proud of. So yeah. The Lovers are good too, but I think the whole thing
You two have every reason to be extremely proud of what you’ve created. It’s a wonderful film. So, to wrap up; are we going to see any more rotoscope animation projects from you guys in the future?
[Morgan Galen King] – We’ve had seven years to really think about all of these characters and the world, and there’s certainly been notes jotted down, outlines sketched out. I always find it kind of obnoxious when people over promise this huge expansive world based on just their one unreleased film. But I think if the appetite was there, if people really wanted it, I think we’d find a way to get something made.
THE SPINE OF NIGHT is currently in select theaters, as well as on digital, and on-demand.
Matthew Essary
Currently residing in Nashville, TN, he also co-hosts the film podcast "Video Culture" (available on all podcast platforms). He can be reached at "WheelsCritic@gmail.com" and on Twitter: @WheelsCritic
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