The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

As a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and the story upon which this film is based in particular, I sat down to watch this quite skeptical that it would be well done. I've seen a lot of Lovecraft adaptations, and they are usually quite a bit worse than bad.

What I got was a real treat. The creators did an excellent job of not only capturing the story, but changing it from an unfilmable, dialogue-free narrative to something more engaging. It looks like a lot of good effort was put into making it as good as it could be on what appears to be a budget of about a couple of hundred dollars.

About the budget, it is quite evident that the creators had a minuscule one. The film is mostly still pictures, with some very minimal animation, and it is all black and white. My one real gripe with it is the quality of the voice recordings. The character voices are too dynamic - sometimes too loud, sometimes, too soft to hear over the music or other sounds. It gets a bit annoying at times in that regard.

Overall, though, this captures the spirit of the original story better than any Lovecraft adaptation I've seen. It speaks volumes about how a good story told well is preferable to a mundane big budget flick any day.

...but considering that The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a full-length animated feature made by a bunch of people on three continents, connected by email and FTP, none of whom had ever made an animated feature before (or a feature-length film of any kind) it is really something special.

Sure, the graphics are largely black and white line-art (provided by masterful comic artist Jason B. Thompson, by way of his five part comic series) and the animation of quite simple (probably half the movement in the film is simply panning and zooming on static images) but somehow it works.

Its first big asset is Thompson's art - imaginative, fantastic, and ambitious. His glorious panoramic vistas of dream-world locations are incredible, and despite their static features, his depictions of the many characters in the story are so good that they truly come to life. The film's second major asset is its gorgeous, haunting score, provided by underground musician Cyoakha Grace O'Manion, with some help from her band Land of the Blind. It is great music in its own right, but it complements the visuals perfectly, and gives the whole film a sense of dream awe and dread.

Add to these assets some very clever animation, that suggests far more than it actually shows, plus some very good voice performances, especially from Toren Atkinson, who provides the voice of the film's hero, Randolph Carter, as well as surprisingly professional and complex foley and sound effects work, and you are left with a film that simply should not have worked, but which works very well.

Technical issues aside, and most important of all, it is entertaining, engrossing, and sometimes even funny, playing up H. P. Lovecraft's under-recognised black humour.

The movie world needs more people like Edward Martin, who are willing to take a huge risk and produce something unique. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft owe it to themselves to see this film.

This is not a perfect adaptation, but it's very close. It is obvious that this film did not have a budget of millions of dollars. However, that is not the main point. Like the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's black and white silent version of "The Call of Cthulhu", it is obvious that this film is also a labor of love. Both films follow the original story and do it well. If you are a true child of technology, you will probably not like this film. If you are more concerned with story, though, then you will love this. This film has more heart than any 50 multimillion dollar productions from Hollywood. A few things that make it less that 10/10 are the fact that the music occasionally is so loud that you can't hear the dialog, the animation is occasionally so poor that it pulls you out of the story, and a couple of the actors read their lines so woodenly that it pulls you out. For what this is, though, these are minor hassles. The music, even when it's too loud, is really quite good, too.

THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH is an ambitious movie, striving to adapt one of H.P. Lovecraft's most fantastical fictions and succeeding in nearly every aspect. Using a unique style of animation, director Edward Martin III has created a movie that should be examined by more than the typical "Lovecraft-Crowd" - the movie is that good. The voice actors did an excellent job wrapping their mouths around the more complex "Lovecraft-isms" (Nyarlathotep anyone?) and still conveying the sense of wonder that a story like ...KADATH evokes. The soundtrack was inspired as well.

If you have an opportunity to see this movie, SEE IT.

There is a magical quality to this film that originates not with Lovecraft's source novel, but with the artist and director's love of that material. This film is ambitious to be sure; it may be the lowest budgeted animated feature ever completed. But the edginess that it derives from its humble origins creates a wonderful expectation in the audience. What will happen next? How will the animation evolve? For one of the most interesting aspects of the film's creation is that it was done linearly; so literally the animation becomes more diverse and innovative as the film progresses! I highly recommend this film not only to fans of Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, but to fans of animation and animated cinema. There is much to be learned from this film's example, and even more to be enjoyed.