First published in 1861, “The Tragedy of Man” has entered the Hungarian cultural consciousness. It’s staged often, and lines from it have become popular quotations. When I mentioned I was writing this piece, my Hungarian wife instantly quoted “Speculation is the death of action” and “Millions for one.”

The play and movie’s main characters are Adam, Eve and Lucifer, “the ancient spirit of denial,” who argues that, because man was created in the image of God, mankind will always want to be gods and own their world.

After Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, Adam decides that, free from God’s rules, he can chase greatness. Lucifer sends Adam to sleep, and they dream their way through history, beginning with ancient Egypt, where a slave tells Adam the magnificent pyramids were built using forced labor, hence the line “millions for one.”

As Adam travels through history with Lucifer, his dreams of greatness in every period of history are revealed to be nightmares. Always, Eve appears to give Adam hope, and the next era begins.

Adam’s last dream is of a future ice age, a dying sun and the end of civilization. When he wakes, he decides the only thing he can do is kill himself and end the human race before it can cause centuries of suffering. He is about to throw himself off a cliff when Eve tells him she’s pregnant. Adam realizes God has beaten him.

God tells Adam all he can do is “strive on, and have faith,” words that must have resonated for Jankovics.

It took Jankovics an incredible 23 years to make “The Tragedy of Man,” starting in 1988 at Pannonia Film Studio. He expected it to take six. After the collapse of Hungarian socialism in 1989 made state funding uncertain, he had to find other ways to finance his hugely ambitious project.

Stop-start Process

Each of the 15 segments was produced one at a time, with production restarting only when Jankovics had secured more funding. The film was finally finished when he received a loan from the Hungarian Ministry of National Resources.

Jankovics’ faith was certainly justified. The film is an astonishing achievement. As the Deaf Crocodile promotional blurb says, it’s “a sprawling, kaleidoscopic masterwork […] one of the most visually stunning and wildly ambitious animated epics ever made (and then some).”

The movie is around two and a half hours long, but so utterly absorbing that I found it impossible to tear my eyes away.

Deaf Crocodile’s Dennis Bartok is a filmmaker, distributor, art-house exhibitor and author. With “The Tragedy of Man,” his firm worked with Hungarian rightsholder Mozinet Films, which licensed the film to it and provided digital materials.

Because the film took so long to make, Jankovics used various animation techniques, and it exists in segments, many animated with traditional analog 2-D techniques and some using digital animation. For the original 2011 release, all the segments were combined into a single digital master, which Deaf Crocodile used for the United States Blu-ray release.

Bartok and his distribution partner, Craig Rogers, date their admiration for Jankovics’ work to around a decade ago, when they worked with the Hungarian National Film Institute to restore another of the artist’s masterpieces, “Son of the White Mare.”

‘Simply Unforgettable’

“The sheer scope of ‘The Tragedy of Man’ and its incredible mixture of artistic, historical and cultural references really blew my mind when I first watched it,” Bartok says.

“Images like the medieval zealots being transformed into Orthodox churches and smashing into one another are so unique and indelible, and the film is filled with literally hundreds and hundreds of sequences like this, simply unforgettable.”

Whenever I write about Hungarian animation, I’m always looking to answer the question of why it is so great.

“Hungarian animation is really synonymous with Pannonia Film Studio. Starting in the 1950s, this grew into one of the most creative and successful animation studios anywhere in the world during its heyday in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s,” Bartok explains.

“We’ve spoken with several former Pannonia animators for our various releases of Hungarian animation, and they all speak in glowing terms about the amazing community of artists there and lament the fact that it’s gone now,” he recalls.

Among all the Hungarian animators, Jankovics stands out. Bartok regards him as “absolutely one of the great masters of Cosmic Animation. There are few other animators who have such an instantly recognizable visual style.

Of course, there is so much more than surreal visuals going on in Jankovics’s films, with his astonishing attempts to reflect and encapsulate world and Hungarian history, mythology, esoteric symbolism.”

I finished by asking Bartok for his top five Hungarian animated classics.

“Because we’ve kind of specialized in releasing great Hungarian animation at Deaf Crocodile, I’ll give my top five of the Hungarian features we’ve put out so far: “Song of the Miraculous Hind” (2002, director Marcell Jankovics); “Bubble Bath” (1979, director György Kovásznai); “Heroic Times” (1984, director József Gémes); “The Tragedy of Man” (2011, director Marcell Jankovics), and “Cat City” (1986, director Béla Ternovszky).”

That should keep us Hungarian animation neophytes occupied on these long, dark winter nights.

The Blu-Ray, available at deafcrocodile.com, comes with a 60-page book featuring essays by esoteric author and historian Mitch Horowitz and film critic, instructor and essayist Walter Chaw. Special features include a conversation with György Ráduly, Director of the NFI Film Archive and another with animator Piroska Martsa and background artist István Orosz, both of whom worked on “The Tragedy of Man.”

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