Just when I am about to lose faith in Western feature animation, here comes a masterwork. The Summit of the Gods made me feel the height and the bites of the arctic conditions more than any live-action film I have ever seen.
Based on a graphic novel, which is based on a book, which is based on real events, which are also probably based on something else, it manages to handle fiction with the stern grip of a documentary—a particularly remarkable achievement for an animated piece.
The Summit of the Gods is about obsessions, the myth of Sisyphus, and the scale of man compared to that of dreams—in this case rendered in the form of monuments of rock and snow and ice.