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Luxembourg, France · 2021
1h 35m
Director Patrick Imbert
Starring Éric Herson-Macarel, Damien Boisseau, Elisabeth Ventura, Lazare Herson-Macarel
Genre Adventure, Animation, Mystery
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Did George Mallory die going up or coming down the summit of Everest on June 8th, 1924? Seventy years later, young reporter Fukumachi buys an old Kodak camera in Kathmandu and thinks he can find the answer. This discovery draws him into the world of eager mountaineers chasing impossible conquests, where love and ghosts intertwine.
One of the truly great animated films this year, one that now places Imbert alongside fellow countrymen Jérémy Clapin (I Lost My Body) and Rémi Chayé (Calamity) as part of a new generation of French animation talent that is delivering high quality animated projects in both story and style.
What Imbert has done here, some years down the line, may solidify The Summit of the Gods, a work of fiction, as one of the greatest Everest films ever made. If nothing else it’s the Everest film that respects the mountain best.
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
On limited terms — capturing the physicality of mountain climbing within the ethereal medium of animation — The Summit of the Gods is distinctive.
It’s here, in these more high-altitude and less high-minded passages that “The Summit of the Gods” reaches the peak of its power, as the lush 2D animation indulges in the kind of ecstatically true vistas that live action would never allow, while Amine Bouhafa’s gorgeous and beguiling score makes every step feel like a spiritual proposition before exploding into an avalanche of synths.
It’s in the climbing sequences that the movie’s animation is at its most imaginative, creating effects both exhilarating and harrowing.
The Summit of the Gods’ complex storytelling and convincingly lovely vistas make its philosophical case well: Whether you’re risking it all to get to a peak, to get to the bottom of a mystery, or to create a painstaking piece of animation, you’re lucky enough to have something you love.
While the film intermittently stuns in revealing Everest’s topographical mystique, its expedition into what makes climbers tick struggles to get off the ground.
While “Summit” doesn’t expand the animation frontier or lift animation as an artform, it’s a perfectly watchable way of telling a reasonably compelling story.
The Summit of the Gods is a standout tale in both story and animation technique.
Los Angeles Times by Tracy Brown
The film’s beautifully painted mountains are particularly striking, and the climbing sequences are among its standouts. Live-action has nothing on the way these scenes convey both the majestic scale of the peaks and the technical skill necessary to attempt these summits (as well as the physical toll involved).
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