Antigonish (1899): or The Man Who Sold the World (1970).

Here's the deal.  There's this thing my mind does with works of art.  I'm not sure how much of a conscious process or choice this is.  It's just something I've noticed every now and then.  What I'm talking about here is the ability to understand one work of art (regardless of medium, be it a poem, TV episode, book, or film) in terms of another.  In other words, sometimes I'll manage to get a better understanding of one story or narrative when I find myself contrasting it with another.  The reason I'm able to do this is because sometimes I'll just run across a Creative Idea that sounds interesting, yet it's also too obscure to figure out on its own.  Then the I'll find yet another, seemingly unrelated story concept, and for whatever reason, just the act of reading and being able to understand this bit of unrelated material will help me to gain a greater knowledge of the previous one that I had difficulty with before.  I'm not sure how common this is among the faces in the aisles.  All I know is that it's just something I do.  I want to say this is a habit that got started sometime way back when I was little.  Like somewhere before I hit the age of nine.  I'm basing this judgment call on a lot of those hazy memories that you're surprised to find still hanging around after such a long time.  The kind that exist on the edge of recollection, and yet the basic gist of their content remains somehow understandable.  This is how it's been for me, anyway.

Like I say, I can't really tell anyone how common this particular type of reading practice is.  I just don't know how many others study the narratives they like in the same way that I do.  So it's kind of useless to ask me if this is anything like part of a greater phenomenon of literary practice.  All I can tell you beyond this point is that this is what happened to me when I had the good fortune to read first an old, forgotten poem (I guess you could call it a children's rhyme), followed by song, also old, this one dating back to the start of the 70s.  The name of the poem was Antigonish.  It's one of those titles that no one remembers, even while there's something memorable about it.  The sort of thing you hear in passing, and then wonder why the word popped into your head later on.  The almost limerick style composition was written and published in the year 1899 by a now obscure poet and educator named William Hughes Mearns.  The song that helped me understand Mearns' poem was The Man Who Sold the World, by David Bowie.  I'm sure that's a juxtaposition few if anyone reading this would be expected to make.  I know I wasn't.  For the longest time, this forgotten poem and the chart topping song were complete and separate entities in my mind.  I ran across Mearns' work in a collection of children's verse in an illustrated primer book whose title I know forget, except that it was edited by Jack Prelutsky.

The Bowie song I ran across by seemingly pure chance one night while staying up late watching a now defunct VH1 programming block.  It was an entire program or segment dedicated to music from the 70s, as I recall.  Somewhere between Ozzy Osbourne's Iron Man and being introduced to the music of Leo Sayer for the first time (yeah, VH1 was dedicated to it's eclecticism back then) someone in a broadcast booth somewhere made the now wise choice to air an old live performance that Bowie gave of the song way back during a 1995 MTV concert special.  It was one of those things where at the time it had no greater meaning than just a way to enjoy a few minutes before dozing off to sleep.  It was the kind of thing I caught once or twice, enough anyway, so that the song got lodged in my head.  The sort of tune that recalls itself to your conscious mind, and you sort of remember it as being kind of interesting, yet you still don't attach all that much importance to it.  What changed that for me was running across that song again in connection with Mearns' bit of poetic doggerel.  What I didn't expect to happen was for Bowie's lyrics to help inform the meaning of Mearns' little rhyme.  The result wound up as something that was less a pair of unrelated verses, and more like a complete and greater poem told in two movements.  That's how I'd like to look at each effort, as two parts of a greater whole.

I do this first because the ideas that came about from pairing the efforts of these two artists in my mind suggest a rich vein of thematic ore that is just too interesting not to share.  Another reason for looking at these two poetic attempts together is because each of them seem to share the same genre.  In many ways, the placing of Antigonish and The Man Who Sold the World together is to create the kind of narrative that is more or less perfect as we get into the Autumn Festival season.  What we have here is a kind of ghost story that I don't think either Bowie or Mearns intended to write.  Yet when you pair their efforts up, what you get is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  I'd like to know it's meaning.

The Tell-Tale Heart (UPA, 1953).

A while back I did this brief little retrospective on an old animation studio.  It was called United Pictures of America, or UPA for short.  To try and summarize a whole lot of history in just a short span of words, the studio was created out by a cadre of Disney animators as a result of their collective decision to revolt against the House of Mouse over the question of wage pay.  For the purposes of this review, that group included all of the artists who worked on the short film under discussion today: Producer Stephen Bosustow; Ink and Paint Designer Paul Julian; Animator Pat Matthews; Production Manager Herb Klynn; Cameraman Jack Eckes; Scriptwriters Bill Scott and Fred Gable; and Director Ted Parmelee.  With Bosustow in the lead, these and a host of other animators, in-betweeners, and illustrators first went on strike against Disney, then left the company all together to set out their own course in the field motion picture animation.  UPA was the eventual result of these efforts, and for a time, it was possible to claim that they were the closest rivals Walt ever had outside of Warner Bros. when it came to making successful theatrical cartoons.  One of the reasons UPA was so good at this was because of their deliberate choice not just to animate outside the boundaries that Disney and Chuck Jones had established with their previous successes.  They were also able to successfully wed their chosen avant-garde minimalist technique to the type of sophisticated subject matter that was perfectly suited to it.

Its a mistake to claim that UPA was the first ever animation studio to base its films off of pre-existing literary source material.  That honor doesn't even belong to Walt Disney himself, but rather to former newspaper comics illustrator Winsor McCay, who has to count as the first published author to ever use the then new medium of animated pictures to bring his own Little Nemo comic strip to life.  From there, of course, Walt would go on to draw from the sources of European folklore and the Brother's Grimm to create some of his most iconic works.  In this sense, UPA wasn't even trying to play catch-up, so much as just continuing the game of Follow the Leader.  What continues to make their efforts stand out from the pack was in the type of literary models they used for inspirations.  UPA was the first studio to take the works of of modern writers such as James Thurber, popular contemporary music, or as in the case of today's offering, popular works of Gothic Fiction.  They did all of this in an effort whose goals were twofold.  First, they wanted to prove that they had what it took to get out of Walt's shadow.  Second of all, Bosustow and Company knew that the way to do that was to prove to the audience that animation could be used to tell stories whose subject matter was more mature than the regular cartoon fair.

It was with this goal in mind that one day Scott and Gable appear to have been the ones to hit on the idea of taking the work of one of the great pioneers of Horror fiction, turning it into a theatrical animated short, and getting none other than Oscar winning actor James Mason to star and narrate in it.  The result was a 1953 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", and it went like this.