The conflict between Spine’s sprawling narrative and tight running time isn’t the only way grandiose ambitions clash with limited means. Imagine, dear nerds, if Bakshi’s infamously truncated Lord of the Rings tried to cover the entire Silmarillion and you’re halfway there.

Unsurprisingly, its onslaught of RPG-like world-building and flashbacks-within-framing-devices on top of gory action leaves little room for fleshed-out characters or emotional arcs, nor dialogue beyond breathless exposition and stoned philosophizing. In a slender 93 minutes Spine attempts to relay an epic saga of power and corruption spanning multiple historical eras, civilizations, and barely overlapping casts of shamans, nobles, warriors, and mages while delving deep into the spiritualism, magic, and Nietzschean mythology of its vaguely medieval fantasy world––then making time for regular scenes of viscera-spilling ultraviolence.

(The dead-serious opening scene of Lawless’s bare-naked shamaness trudging through an alpine blizzard acts as a solid indicator of tone.) It’s a deathly earnest film––like George Lucas-caliber earnest––guts-filled with capital-L lore, grim violence, artful nudity, and portentous monologues––not-always-convincingly delivered by a vocal cast that includes Lucy Lawless and Patton Oswalt––that never dare consciously wink at the intrinsic camp of its culty-retro throwback venue. The new rotoscope-animated feature-a clearly adoring homage to Ralph Bakshi, Heavy Metal, and 1980s dark fantasy-was created over a span of seven years by a minuscule team of animators digitally painting frame-by-frame with the oversight of directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King. One thing is certain about The Spine of Night: this is a labor of bone-shattered, triptacular love.

The spine of night