An animation classic with increasingly unhinged narration from actor James Mason. A more contemporary animated take on the same classic story. Which one held up better? Which came closer to capturing the spirit of the original Edgar Allan Poe classic?
On Monday night, a dozen people gathered virtually for the New Haven Free Public Library’s monthly Animation Celebration to hash it out.
Hosted by Haley Grunloh, technical assistant at Mitchell Library, the NHFPL’s Animation Celebration has been meeting virtually during the pandemic to watch and discuss animation classics in the mainstream and off the beaten path. This month, Grunloh chose the seasonally appropriate topic of animated takes on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. She began with an animated short from 1953.
The Tell-Tale Heart
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” one of Poe’s most famous works, tells the story of a man who murders another and tries and fails to cover it up. Grunloh began with a bit of background. UPA, she informed the audience, was “an animation studio that was founded by a bunch of disgruntled Disney animators.” This was in the wake of a Disney strike in the 1940s, after which several animators founded their own studios. Ted Parmelee, who directed “The Tell-Tale Heart,” had worked on Pinocchio and did commercials and other short films. He would go on to work on Rocky and Bullwinkle “which is a favorite of mine,” Grunloh said.
In making “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the UPA animators “didn’t have the resources of the Disney studio anymore,” Grunloh continued, “but they were really interested in experimenting outside the Disney style.”
The financial constraints led to interesting artistic decisions. They had to answer a question: “How do you tell a story with less of the fluid motion” of Disney animation, “which is the most expensive and time-consuming part?” In addressing that question, she said, “they also had the freedom to get a little weird and a little dark.” That freedom paid off. It was the first animated film rated X, for adults only, by the British Board of Film Censors. It also got an Oscar nomination, and has since entered the National Film Registry of culturally significant films.
Grunloh’s audience quickly began comparing Parmelee’s film to a 2013 animated take on the story by director Raul Garcia, which Grunloh had also asked them to watch. “The later cartoon seemed to rush it when he started hearing the heart,” one participant said. “The first film did a better job of prolonging that. It was in better taste and I liked the animation better.”
Grunloh agreed. “A lot of the shorts in Extraordinary Tales,” Garcia’s film, “feel a little rushed.” Of the 1953 film, “I liked how they constructed it,” she added. The architecture of the house could seem mazelike. “But it’s always clear what’s happening” — even if “we never see the narrator’s face. Maybe it’s to give us more of the impression that we are the narrator.”
“I didn’t realize the animators were from Disney,” said another participant. “They make some awesome choices.” To her, the film’s artistic style hearkened back to the Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an early horror film that uses surrealist set design to great effect.
Grunloh agreed. “The backgrounds, and that checker pattern that keeps showing up,” she said.
“This is such a perfect Halloween choice,” said another participant. James Mason’s narration was “fantastic. He has the perfect voice.”
The Fall of the House of Usher
In this story, Poe tells the tale of a brother and sister living alone in a decaying house. The sister falls gravely ill, but it’s possible she’s buried prematurely. Things go downhill from there. Like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been filmed many times. Grunloh focused on a 1980 animated short by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer.
Svankmajer, Grunloh said, “is a super-interesting, super-influential filmmaker” and a “pioneer in stop motion technique.” He was a “big influence on Terry Gilliam” and directed a lot of live action films. “A lot of his stuff is really weird and disturbing, and kind of gross and violent,” she said. A lot of his work was done “under censorship laws restricting what he could and could not talk about.” For a time, “he was only allowed to make films based on literary classics or folklore. I guess someone thought it was a way to stop him from being subversive, because we all know literary classics are never subversive,” she added, drawing appreciative laughter.
Having seen several of his films, when she learned that he had made a version of “Usher,” “I thought, ‘Oh wow, this is going to be really messed up…. I was expecting it to be a lot freakier than it was.” She added that “if you want to see the most awkward, disturbing Alice in Wonderland,” viewers should give Svankmajer’s version a try.
One participant who had also seen some of Svankmajer’s other films agreed with Grunloh. “I thought this was a much more literal interpretation compared to other films I’ve seen of him,” she said.
To Grunloh, it was “interesting that there were no people in it.” The story was all told through narration, featuring inanimate objects — from chairs and cabinets to coffins — moving around a giant, foreboding old house.
“I liked the chair — the zooming in close. It felt atmospheric and I can’t say why,” one participant said. Grunloh agreed, but also added that “there’s something really silly about watching the chairs walk down the corridor and jump out the window.” The ability of horror to tilt into comedy was a theme the discussion would revisit.
This was another participant’s first Svankmajer film and she found it pleasantly unsettling enough. “It was like mildew and mold and sticky clay and leaves decomposing and bricks falling apart, so it was a sensual kind of thing, of a building falling apart,” she said. She had also watched it without the English subtitles. “It was kind of cool without the translation.”
One participant who had read the original story recently said “there was a focus on the house being alive,” so the style seemed appropriate.
“The decay of the house is supposed to represent the decay of the mind,” Grunloh said. “It amuses me that,” in Svankmajer’s film, the house “doesn’t look like a Victorian manor. It looks like an abandoned industrial building.” She added that this was a chance for the director to do many of the things that he does in other films, particularly in created visceral sound design. “He likes to make you cringe,” Grunloh said.
Vincent
Tim Burton’s early animated short isn’t about Edgar Allan Poe so much as Burton’s own childhood infatuation with Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price, which Burton was able to look back upon in this animated short — narrated by none other than Vincent Price.
“I think this film is adorable,” Grunloh said. “It was one of the first things Tim Burton did,” before going on to direct films like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands, and to producing and overseeing The Nightmare Before Christmas. In 1982, however, he was an animator working at Disney. “He originally was going to write a picture book, but some of his supervisors at Disney encouraged him to make it into a film. I think the character is a little autobiographical,” Grunloh said. As Burton was a huge Vincent Price fan, Disney called Price to see if he would narrate. Price agreed, later calling it “the most gratifying thing that’s ever happened to me,“ Grunloh reported. “This was the beginning of a long and rewarding friendship for Burton and Vincent Price.”
“Oh, it was wonderful,” one participant said.
Grunloh said the film used “stop motion, but a much more traditional approach. They made the little dolls, they made the little sets. He definitely had a production company behind him but it’s low budget.”
“It kind of reminds me of Edward Gorey’s work — macabre and whimsical,” said another participant.
“Yes, creepy and cute,” Grunloh said.
“It’s funny how many of his later films you can see in this one film,” another participant said.
“Tim Burton isn’t so much an animator as a designer,” Grunloh said, adding that the cat in “Vincent” looks just like the cat in a later Burton film, Coraline. “He has such a recognizable style to his artwork,” Grunloh said. “It’s Gothic but in a cute way, rather than a genuinely scary way.”
Burton’s affection and wry humor, to Grunloh, also pointed out something about Poe. His stories, he said, “are really well written, but they’re so over the top that they invite this sort of affectionate parody.”
“The satire makes the gore fun,” said a participant, which was a good segway to the take on “The Raven” that appeared in a 1990 episode of The Simpsons.
The Raven
Poe’s poem about being spooked and harassed by an insistent bird has become a part of American literature. As one participant noted, “‘The Raven’ was a real hit, even though he didn’t make any money from it.” Poe was asked to recite it at parties. And parodies of it came out almost immediately. So the Simpsons episode, narrated by James Earl Jones, was in a sense part of a long lineage.
“I don’t have anything else to say about it except that it’s adorable,” Grunloh said, adding that her middle school teacher showed it to her class.
“I was like Homer Simpson. I got spooked by it,” said another participant.
Extraordinary Tales
This brought the discussion back around to the 2013 animated anthology Extraordinary Tales, a series of animated shorts directed by Raul Garcia and featuring narration from Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, Julian Sands, Guillermo Del Toro, and Roger Corman. By 2013, Grunloh pointed out, horror movies had previous horror movies to build upon and refer back to. “It’s all this kind of creative inbreeding,” she said. Garcia himself “has had a long career in animation, working with both 2D and 3D animation. He worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and a ton of Disney,” she added.
But “this is the first feature film he directed himself,” Grunloh continued, a “pet project outside of his career working as an animator for other people. He grew up addicted to all these old-timey horror movies, stories and comics. He wanted each section of the anthology to have its own unique visual style, and he wanted to try to get somebody famous, with some connection to the horror genre, to be the narrator for each section.”
Grunloh added that she was not always a fan of digital animation, though she conceded that “it is probably the most common, cost-effective way to make animation,” and “he works hard to do interesting things with it.”
The discussion of Garcia’s take on “Usher” led to an interesting question. “Somehow I got the vibe that there was an incestuous thing between the brother and the sister in this one,” one participant said. Was that in the original? a few people asked. Someone had read it recently. “There’s this idea that they’re the last people in this family,” she said, and “they talk about how it’s just the two of them living in this house. It feels very unhealthy, the whole thing.” It’s “about decay — they never branched out and went out in the world.”
“There is something you could say is incestuous about that,” another participant said. “And the whole story is so creepy that he buried her” — and when it appears she may still be alive, “he doesn’t go down and help her out.”
“It’s almost like they’re kind of the same person, or enmeshed in some way,” said another participant.
“And with the house,” Grunloh said.
The audience was divided on how much they liked the animation style. Some thought the variety worked. Others weren’t convinced. “There are things I like about Extraordinary Tales,” Grunloh said, “but it’s a little inconsistent.”
At the same time, it led to a reappraisal of Edgar Allan Poe as both author and literary figure, something of a character himself in the annals of American letters. “I was especially attracted to this because it made me think of Poe’s death and wonder,” one participant said. Grunloh gave a quick synopsis of the lack of clarity surrounding the author’s demise. He was found “incoherent, possibly drunk. He was wearing someone else’s clothes. He kept asking for someone and they don’t know who it was. It’s been built up as this weird history mystery.” There was speculation as to the role of madness, or drugs, in Poe’s life. Opium, as one participant pointed out, “wasn’t illegal then, and it was around.”
All participants agreed that the last entry in Extraordinary Tales — “The Masque of the Red Death” — was jarringly timely.
“It’s an appropriate story for our times,” Grunloh said.
“Totally appropriate,” a participant agreed.
The New Haven Free Public Library’s Animation Celebration reconvenes on Nov. 16. Visit its calendar for more details.