ANI-MOVIES, *Fear(s) Of The Dark

Not related to the Canadian horror movie, Fear(s) Of The Dark is an animated horror anthology done entirely in black-and-white by Prima Linea Productions who also helped produce The Red Turtle film from Studio Ghibli. This was done as the brainchild of a select group of cartoonists and designers that pulled their talents to create a study of fear in everything from social anxiety to full-blown horror. The major problem with the film is the sequence it is presented in, as it is has several different segments that don't chronologically play out one after the other. There are wraparound intervals between each chapter which are all narrated pieces of a woman going over her everyday woes with a constantly shifting graphic backdrop. The interior components are their own separate installments, even though a few of them break to backup to a previous story that hadn't completed yet, so it's the horror anthology equivalent of channel surfing while you're watching something on one TV network.

The first and opening story is four chapters of a nobleman walking around town with his quartet of violent dogs that each hunt down an innocent victim who is powerless to fight back which ends with the final canine turning on his sadistic master. The next tale is by comic artist Charles Burns who created Black Hole about a shy young man who begins a relationship with a girl he knows from college that turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare with insect/human hybrids. Following that is one that also gets brought back througout different points in the movie about a Japanese girl plagued by the ghost of a samurai. After this is a particularly creepy story where a boy in rural France witnesses his neighbors getting slaughtered by a crocodile, which is odd enough considering there aren't any crocodiles native to that area, but the victims it left behind are forever changed into creatures of the night. The finale is the longest where a large man seeks shelter from a snowstorm in an old, abandoned house and finds himself going through the memories of a former occupant as he slowly gets trapped in the dark confines of the haunted mansion.

Fear(s) Of The Dark blends in traditional and CGI animation in their own segments, and still looks good since it was made in 2007. There is no English dub so that might put off a few potential American viewers, but it maintains the tradition of horror anthology movies like Creepshow even if half the material is about everyday fears and not just supernatural. The eerie imagery puts you in the mood for dark tales of one of our deepest emotions.