(1997)
3.5
Robert Firsching
Australian animator Ray Nowland's crude, fascinating directorial debut (he had previously worked on some of the Dot cartoons) is an adult allegory hearkening back to the days of Ralph Bakshi's envelope-pushing experiments in feature animation (Wizards, Fritz the Cat). The amusing premise postulates that God is actually an alien named G.D. who slew the dinosaurs and repopulated the earth with apes from his own planet. The Devil is G.D.'s son Little Red, who disagrees with his businessman father's tactics and upsets his plans at every opportunity. There's much more to it than that, with inbreeding aliens, Jesus riding a surfboard, and Red actually challenging his father's alliance with Adolf Hitler, but to reveal anymore of the film's internal inventions would spoil its many clever surprises. An underground epic with admittedly shoddy production values (it makes South Park look like Akira), Go to Hell! deserves to be cut some technical slack. After all, Nowland single-handedly drew all of the animation. The picture is filled with more raw invention and exuberance than any ten of the visually flamboyant manga pictures so in vogue at the time. If it can't quite sustain its outrageous premise (Little Red is pretty much mankind's hero), Go to Hell! is still certainly an impressive attempt to completely rewrite the history of the universe in less time than it takes to train a Pokemon.
Go to Hell! on AllMovie
Go to Hell! (1997)
