The Tragedy of Man (Hungarian: Az ember tragédiája) is a 2011 Hungarian adult animated epic drama film directed by Marcell Jankovics, starring Tibor Szilágyi, Mátyás Usztics, Ágnes Bertalan, Tamás Széles and Piroska Molnár. The narrative is set in several different eras, spanning from Biblical creation to 50,000 BC to the distant future, and follows Adam, Eve, and Lucifer as they explore humanity and the meaning of life. Each segment has a different visual style to reflect the art of the respective time periods. The film is based on the 1861 play The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách. The film went into production in 1988, but encountered difficulties as the production model for Hungarian cinema changed. The segments were financed individually and sometimes exhibited independently at film festivals and on Hungarian television. After 23 years in production, the finished film premiered in 2011. It is one of the longest animated films ever made.
Plot God creates the universe. Lucifer mocks God for the shortcomings of humanity, which he predicts will soon aspire to become God. As the primaeval spirit of negation, he claims to be as old as God and demands his share of the world, which he is granted in the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Immortality. Lucifer tempts Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. Expelled from the Garden of Eden and abandoned by God, Adam reasons that he is no longer obliged to show God any gratitude. He decides to live from his own strength alone. Lucifer offers Adam to experience his own future, and takes him from the Stone Age into the future, throughout human history. In ancient Egypt, Adam is Pharaoh Djoser in 2650 BC who falls in love with Eve in the form of a slave woman. Adam abolishes slavery, but Lucifer, as Anubis, argues that it would be futile, as history would prove. Adam is taken to ancient Greece, where democracy has resulted in corruption and foul political play. Adam appears as Miltiades in 489 BC and is sentenced to death after the masses have been agitated against him. Disillusioned, Adam is taken to ancient Rome in 67 AD where he and Lucifer enjoy themselves with gladiator games and prostitutes. As civilization grows decadent and falls apart, Adam and Eve encounter Saint Peter and then Jesus, and turn to God, who gives them a message of love and fraternity. Adam becomes Tancred, Prince of Galilee in 1096 AD but is disgusted by all the petty savagery within a Church prone to schisms. He falls in love with Eve who is locked inside a monastery. Adam is then Johannes Kepler in Prague, 1615. He seeks eternal wisdom by studying the physical world while his wife is unfaithful. Adam becomes Georges Danton during the French Revolution in Paris, 1794. Eve appears as an aristocrat who is guillotined and as a prostitute who revels in the revolutionary terror. Danton is eventually put before the National Convention and executed for conspiring with the aristocracy. Once again in the body of Kepler, Adam wakes up from a dream. He recognizes that ideas are more powerful and long-lasting than individual men. Adam and Lucifer visit Victorian London in 1897 as unnamed Englishmen, which Adam initially finds impressive but Lucifer argues is decayed on a spiritual level, as everything has become a commodity. Adam tries to court Eve and is eventually able to seduce her, right after World War I, with the help of jewels and a Gypsy fortune-teller. When social unrest erupts in the 20th century, Adam wishes for a society ruled after scientific principles for the common good. Lucifer brings Adam to a future egalitarianist world state in the center of the 21st century. Although initially positive, Adam immediately regrets the disappearance of nations, as he thinks people should have a past and an identity to hold on to. Animals and plants which are not useful are extinct and the useful ones have been genetically modified. Adam questions the materialist worldview and is arrested for criminal thinking. Eve appears as a mother who is punished for refusing to let society educate her child. Adam and Lucifer travel further to a dehumanized future in space. Adam is at first unsettled, but when the spirit of Earth urges him to return, he proclaims that his spirit can live beyond the body. On the verge of annihilation, Adam changes his mind and promises to keep striving on Earth. He accepts mortality and man's struggle. In a distant ice age, the last remains of humanity are dying. The few people Adam encounters are deformed savages. Lucifer argues that they do not differ in nature from humans of any other era. Adam wakes up in his cave 50,000 BC. He joins Lucifer on a cliff, where he argues for the existence of free will, while Lucifer reminds him of the futility of human ambition. Adam argues that he can still go against God by committing suicide. As he is about to leap from the cliff, Eve finds him and tells him that she is pregnant. God urges Adam to keep having faith. Adam decides to follow God's word and accepts struggle as an end in itself.
Cast Tibor Szilágyi as the Lord Mátyás Usztics as Lucifer Ágnes Bertalan as Eve Tamás Széles as Adam Piroska Molnár as the spirit of Earth
Soundtrack The soundtrack of the movie is comprised by multiple fragments extracted mostly from pieces of classical music, some of them used as leitmotifs throughout the movie. Here is a list of pieces used (according to the credits).
Production Marcell Jankovics wrote the screenplay for the film in 1983. It is based on Imre Madách's 1861 play The Tragedy of Man. The film went into production in 1988 at Pannonia Film Studio. Jankovics expected a typical animated feature to take three years to produce, but since The Tragedy of Man would have twice the running time of a typical film he expected it to take six years to make. After the fall of communism in Hungary in 1989, Jankovics could no longer rely on the state-funded system he had produced his previous films within and had to seek alternative ways to finance the project.
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