Fantasia 2025: Dog of God and the Rot of Animated Extremes

Last year, the global animation scene was rocked by Flow, a minimal yet emotionally charged film that swam upstream from Latvia all the way to the Oscars. Made in Blender and centered around a silent cat, it showed how far a non-traditional production pipeline and quiet storytelling could go. Now, Latvia returns to the animation conversation with Dog of God, a film that shares almost nothing with Flow apart from a feline. This time, the cat gets its anus French kissed.

Yes, you read that right.

The Gospel of Depravity

Dog of God throws us into the 17th century, into a decaying Swedish villa where rot is the dominant language. A priest presides over the village alongside his so-called dog, an errand boy with a voice that scrapes the walls. There is a bourgeois couple struggling with infertility and libido, a tavern woman accused of witchcraft, and then, there is the arrival of a self-proclaimed werewolf. The scrotum he carries, turns out, belongs to the devil. This is not a metaphor. This is quite literally what the film presents.

There is something undeniably fascinating about how the Abele brothers construct this world. An unholy blend of rotoscope animation, ultraviolence, psychosexual excess, and mythological absurdity. From its opening moment where the sea parts and the devil is castrated, the film enters a territory so bizarre that it feels like watching The Holy Mountain through the lens of doom metal.

Between the Buried and the Bizarre

If Vulcanizadora felt like Metallica’s Black Album, this one leans into The Great Misdirect by Between the Buried and Me. Structurally erratic, brutally detailed, and conceptually unhinged, Dog of God maintains a fever pitch throughout. Some will laugh. Others will turn away. A select few will feel spiritually nourished by the chaos.

There are traces of other animated bloodlines here. The Spine of Night comes to mind, both films revel in cosmic grotesquery and genre mutation. The rotoscoping, the medieval decay, the violence that borders on the ecstatic, all of it invites admiration, or at the very least, awe.

But where The Spine of Night felt like a unified fever dream, Dog of God begins to sprawl.

Lost in the Madness

The first half introduces multiple characters but offers little in terms of structure or conflict. We meet a handful of figures: the priest, the accused woman, the werewolf, the mayor obsessed with carnal legacy, yet none of them feel anchored. The film juggles tones and arcs without giving us a clear sense of why we should care. There is thematic potential buried in almost every strand: religious hypocrisy, sexual repression, myth as madness, the commodification of the female body. But too often, those threads are dropped in favor of shock or spectacle.

There is merit to that approach, especially for viewers who find entertainment in human degradation, for those who seek catharsis through chaos. But for me, that surface-level depravity eventually diluted the impact. The film seemed more interested in how far it could go rather than why it was going there in the first place.

Animation is for Everyone, but Not Every Animated Film Is

Dog of God is the kind of film that tends to be weaponized in the discourse around “animation for adults.” Yes, it is technically proficient. Yes, it commits to its world with sincerity. But being adult should be more than just being disgusting. There is a difference between confronting something and wallowing in it. Death Does Not Exist, also at this year’s Fantasia, pushed into existential terrain with restraint. Dog of God, by contrast, tears off its own skin in pursuit of meaning but ends up spinning in place.

There is an audience for this kind of work. I am glad Fantasia makes space for it. But even within its excess, I found myself wishing for something tighter, something more purposeful. The spectacle is there. The craft is impressive. The ambition is evident. But when the blood dried, I was left with very little that lingered beyond the absurdity.