Imagine it: hand-drawn paper puppets in hell, image enough to intrigue any slightly savvy film-goer. Add to this a socio-political commentary of the satirical bend, and filmmaker Sean Meredith’s Dante’s Inferno is worth its weight in wit. In crafting the animation, Meredith, in collaboration with writers and artists Sandow Birk and Paul Zaloom, has gone against the grain of the socio-politically dire, rendering a comedy so stricking that it indeed lives up to the divine.

In modernizing Dante Alighieri’s journey into the afterlife, the adaptation pulls on popular culture and political ponderings, adding to the textbook classic a sense of everyday dark humor. From a musical interlude of dancing dirty politicians to a game show scenerio of “guess that sin,” individual scenes roast the modern landscape, freely labeling its sinners from Leni Riefenstahl to Dick Cheney.

With voice talent from actors Dermot Mulroney (Bastard Out of Carolina, Lovely & Amazing) and James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential, The Queen), the film rides as much on the interaction of distinctive voices as on its intricate toy theater artwork. Both parts complement each other seemlessly although certainly the methods of the art itself are evident in every frame. Strings, sticks and other tools used to move the delicate paper puppets are left visible, an artistic choice that at first stands out and then progressively infuses itself into the fabric of the film as naturalistic.

Delicately detailed and completed with evident passion, Dante’s Inferno sketches our sins in smart tidbits of culture and plays as a film worth seeing if only as a reminder of where we don’t want to go and who we don’t want to become.

For more information on the film, visit www.dantefilm.com.