by Barack Obama, among others<\/a>) of exoticising Afro-Brazilians, it\u2019s still an infectious plunge into carnival abandon; and then, with bereaved Orfeu descending the staircase of an abandoned missing-persons bureau, into a spiritual underworld.<\/p>\nA sublimely animated tale. Photograph: \u00a9 CMC Pictures<\/p>\n
Loosely based on 16th-century novel Investiture of the Gods, this blockbuster animation resides on box office Olympus: it\u2019s the highest grossing animation ever worldwide and the fifth highest grossing film overall. Like its more famous contemporary, Journey to the West, a hotch-potch of Chinese mythology, folklore, Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, director Jiaozi extracts from this tangle a furiously entertaining, sublimely animated tale of a demigod tyke trying to defend his village.<\/p>\n
11. Die Nibelungen (1924)<\/p>\n
Dedicated \u201cto the German people\u201d, the rumour is that Fritz Lang\u2019s two-part version of the national epic poem was Hitler\u2019s preferred comfort watch. Full of lambent high-fantasy imagery and elements later borrowed by Tolkien (lurking dragons, kooky hobbit-like bystanders, invisibility-conferring artefacts), it does indeed feel like a silent-era Lord of the Rings. Der F\u00fchrer evidently had a child\u2019s taste in heroism: with his preening heroics, harassing a poor old dragon who looks as if he\u2019s strayed out of Fraggle Rock, Siegfried comes across as an arrogant prig.<\/p>\n
Not as consistently brilliant as Life of Brian, but the debut Python feature-length still mercilessly skewers the epic mindset essential to all mythological antics. Strange women lobbing around mythical swords, Sir Robin\u2019s overly honest herald, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, the police belatedly arriving to abruptly call time on the Round Table \u2026 take your bathetic pick.<\/p>\n
Iconic VFX \u2026 Jason and the Argonauts. Photograph: ScreenProd\/Photononstop\/Alamy<\/p>\n
This earns its Top 10 placing thanks to Ray Harryhausen\u2019s justifiably iconic stop-motion and other VFX work: the hydra\u2019s-teeth skeleton fight is an intricate showstopper, and Poseidon \u2013 seemingly superimposing some bloke in from the local swimming pool \u2013 holding open the clashing rocks is charming too. But whisper it: the rest of the film is pretty ropey. Todd Armstrong is a bland Jason, and the Argonauts are a bunch of callow ingrates who blow their five favours from Hera in the first 45 minutes.<\/p>\n
Critically sneered at and smote by a race-lifting controversy on release, Alex Proyas\u2019s film is not just a rare outing for Horus, Set and co, but maybe the closest the 21st century has come to the unabashed Harryhausenesque mythological joyride. There\u2019s a proggy excess here that is perfect for the primal alien weirdness of the Egyptian pantheon: the gods bleed gold, Geoffrey Rush\u2019s Ra fights off an apocalyptic chaos dragon every night, the thief hero must dodge black and white cobra-riding dominatrix goddesses.<\/p>\n
7. Oedipus Rex (1967)<\/p>\n
An elemental, deranged, punk take on Freud\u2019s favourite bedtime story, by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Franco Citti, the pin-up boy for self-fulfilling prophecies, prowls the wastelands as if in a Hellenic spaghetti western before waylaying his own dad, taking the throne in Thebes and marrying his mum, the eyebrowless Jocasta. Unwilling to see the bald truth, the king uses tyranny and repression to hide from it; Pasolini, bookending his fable with a modern-day framing, lambasts the blindness of authority with full Marxist ire.<\/p>\n
Haunting \u2026 Ralph Ineson in a scene from The Green Knight. Photograph: Landmark Media\/Alamy<\/p>\n
\u201cWas it not just a game?\u201d When Groot\u2019s gnarlier brother comes a-calling on Christmas Day with a special proposition for Arthur\u2019s Round Table, David Lowery unpacks the latent pagan severity outside the castle of civilisation in this haunting picaresque. Is the Green Knight\u2019s challenge about testing the mettle of mankind\u2019s moral standards? Or is he here to tell us all that is meaningless in the face of nature? Big questions, that\u2019ll need big Dev Patel chivalry to withstand.<\/p>\n
5. Mayabazar (1957)<\/p>\n
A venerated Telugu industry classic, this Mahabharata remix is spilling over with pomp and circumstance as a posse of gods and Pandavas try to stop Krishna\u2019s niece, Sasirekha, from marrying a wrong \u2019un. SV Ranga Rao is a knockout as the demon warlord Ghatotkacha, who hilariously sabotages the nuptials. The special effects \u2013 flying weapons annulling one another in mid-air, and self-replenishing feasts \u2013 are first-rate for the era. And, just as we are watching them, the deities constantly watch each other, in scrying devices and in staged vignettes; all of existence truly a mid-tiered proscenium.<\/p>\n
A Hayao Miyazaki classic. Photograph: Entertainment Pictures\/Alamy<\/p>\n
While not a straight mythological adaptation (otherwise it would be placed higher), the Hayao Miyazaki classic brims with offbeat borrowings from Shintoism. The susuwatari dustball helpers in the bathhouse are in the lineage of yokai domestic spirits, Haku the demi-human dragon is likely drawn from the Mizuchi river spirit, and chain-smoking witch Yubaba is a spin on the Yama-uba wilderness hag. This teeming folkloric bathhouse is where Studio Ghibli scrubbed up for its finest hour.<\/p>\n
3. Clash of the Titans (1981)<\/p>\n
The Harryhausen sequences aren\u2019t as impressive as those in Jason and the Argonauts, but the storyline is a huge improvement. That\u2019s partly because of a greater awareness of the classical sensibility in terms of the gods sporting with mortals, with Harry Hamlin\u2019s Perseus moved around like a chess piece by the goddess Thetis. But contemporary influences also chip in, such as Burgess Meredith as a Rocky-esque mentor and Bubo the owl in the sidekick R2-D2 slot. Featuring a greatest hits of the Greek bestiary, including a fruitily pronounced \u201cKrrrr-aken\u201d, it was a Christmas TV staple for a reason.<\/p>\n
Trust the nation where polytheism is still a living reality to school the world in myth-making. SS Rajamouli\u2019s two-part Telugu colossus isn\u2019t based on any established body of legend, but its saga of aristocratic foundlings, rival siblings and warring kingdoms is pure Mahabharata fan fiction. Even considering how Indian films routinely amp up banal action fare with mythological trimmings, Rajamouli ramps the valour dial up to 11, then blows the levels out. When the hero\u2019s first act is to carry a cast-iron shrine down a river on his shoulder like an Amazon parcel, and you\u2019ve still got nearly five hours to go, you know you\u2019re in for a treat.<\/p>\n
1. Orph\u00e9e (1950)Jean Marais and Maria Casar\u00e8s. Photograph: Collection Christophel\/Alamy<\/p>\n
The mythological movie can go monumental, like Baahubali, or it can reflect what the ancients knew: that the divine and the eternal inhabit the everyday. \u201cA legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,\u201d opens Jean Cocteau\u2019s take on Orpheus \u2013 before opting for smalltown bohemia, with a burnished Jean Marais as a past-his-prime poet on the lookout for sharp new forms. It appears Cocteau may have been a film noir fan: Orph\u00e9e has prim Eurydice (Marie D\u00e9a) expecting a baby at home, but he\u2019s inexorably drawn to the femme fatale (Mar\u00eda Casar\u00e8s) apparently responsible for the death of a fellow poet outside the local cafe.<\/p>\n
Its other contemporary correspondences are inspired: the Rolls-Royce radio that tunes Orph\u00e9e into an infinite ether of inspiration; the domestic parody that replaces Orpheus\u2019 underworld exit, when the easily distracted artist must not look at his wife; the soixante-huitard Bacchantes, led by hip Juliette Gr\u00e9co, who finally do him in. But this tug of war between art and life also hauls us into its metaphysical netherworld so seamlessly, it continues to echo in other times and places, as true myths should. If David Lynch\u2019s penchant for reverse-speed surrealism doesn\u2019t owe something to Orph\u00e9e, there can be no doubt about The Matrix\u2019s meniscus mirrors. All gratifying confirmation for Cocteau of art\u2019s primacy \u2013 though even he leaves the door ajar for life at the very end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Featuring the young Henry Cavill as a Theseus who barely gets near a labyrinth, this Hellenic \u201creimagination\u201d bags…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-682465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}