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.
