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. The Story.
Conclusion: An Overlooked Animated Classic.
There's a lot that needs to be said about a writer like Edgar Allan Poe. The good news is that much of it has been written and talked about before. One of the things to be grateful for about Poe is that he still counts (as of this writing) as a known quantity. He's one of the All-American Brand Names. His reputation (along with that of Nathaniel Hawthorne) as one of the major pioneers of modern Horror fiction is still secure. It's a blessing of sorts for the critic in that it means a lot the ground that has to be covered counts as familiar terrain, even to a lot of people who otherwise don't count as bookworms. Like it says on the tin, when we talk about Poe, we're always talking more or less about the moment when the Gothic genre came into its own in this country. That's because Poe seems to have been the one imaginative mind to come along at the right place and time. Like everything else during the 19th century, the world of letters was close to nearing its defining moment. The one instance when its sense not just of character, but also of all the myriad possibilities of creative potential was sort of waiting around in a state of readiness. All that was needed was the voice which would lead it forward. For whatever reason, Poe turned out to be the best writer fit enough to get the job done.
A lot of that remains down to how his mind worked as a writer. For whatever reason, he just seems to have had the kind of mental framework that was comfortable not just with letting itself wander into all of the subject matter territory that was considered taboo at the time. He also possessed an Imagination capable not just of thinking about a lot of dark subject matter, whether realistic or otherwise, but also of being able to conjure up just the right images or words that would help bring these horrors to nightmarish life. The landscape of Poe's narratives is often a familiar one. A lot of it bears the same appearance as the American society and countryside of both his own day, and our own, as well. Poe's talent, however, rests in taking this seemingly realistic framework, and then revealing and reveling in this kind of surrealistic, dark phantasmagoria that underlies everything. A good example of what I'm talking about can be seen if we take a look at just a of smidge of narration from the very short story which inspired the cartoon under discussion here today. This is from "The Tell-Tale Heart.
"Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen
know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should
have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—
with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to
work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the
whole week before I killed him. And every night, about
midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it—oh, so
gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient...I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no
light shone... I moved it
slowly—very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old
man’s sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head
within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha!—would a madman have been so wise as this?
And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the
lantern cautiously—oh, so cautiously—cautiously (for the
hinges creaked)—I undid it just so much that a single thin
ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long
nights—every night just at midnight—but I found the eye
always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it
was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And
every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the
chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by
name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the
night. So you see he would have been a very profound old
man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I
looked in upon him while he slept".
I think what we've got here is one of those cases where the artist's diction can go a long way towards telling you things not just about the narrator or the other cast members, but also something important about the kind of secondary world the characters inhabit. The thing about about Poe is he's got this kind of interesting way of creating imaginary landscapes and the people within it. A lot of its looks the same as our world, and yet like there's always something off about it. It's like wherever you look there's always an angle out of place, or human frames out of joint. No matter how ordinary things may look, Poe always writes his situation so that you can tell there is something either wrong or else just plain out of the ordinary about it. We're never, in the strictest sense, in anything like the normal, everyday reality that we can perceive with our own eyes, Instead, it's more as if the author was able to create an entirely different world and race of people to go along with it. Poe does this not in the sense of creating fictional alien planets, which is one thing. Instead, one gets the sense that the writer is responsible in moments like the passage cited above for crafting these entire spectral otherworlds where even the living characters count more as haunted ghosts of one kind or another, instead of just normal humans.
I think it's this ability to make the human seem unnatural that accounts for a great deal of Poe's staying power as an author. He affords his audience a chance to take a glimpse of life through his own self-manufactured distorted mirror. Every story is like a scrying glass where the difference between the inner and outer landscape gets collapsed until even the reader has difficulty telling truth from fiction apart. I couldn't say how that must sound. The best I can offer is that this as good a description of the practice and effect that Poe was always able to achieve in his fiction. It's also not something that was unique to him. The idea that the outer world can become a mirror of the inner disorder of the protagonist has to be one of the most common tropes or defining traditions of the Horror genre. This is the philosophy of symbolic, Romantic Expressionism. The keynote of this particular literary practice is that what might be called the stage setting and props for this kind of story never exists the sake of Realism. It's meant to achieve a higher thematic significance. In terms of the kind of Gothic fiction that Poe worked with, this meant that the landscape takes on an aspect that turns it into a mirror for the often aberrant psychological processes going on within the mind of the beholder or protagonist.
The Gothic Landscape is one that means to plumb the depths of the human mind, both the dark and the light. It's the idea of the story's setting as a symbolic microcosm for the inner conflicts of the character. It's one of the oldest literary traditions out there. Something that extends as far back as the allegorical practices of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and all the way right up to the titular poetic setting of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In fact, a good way to describe the thematic function of the Gothic Landscape is to claim that all it is is what happens once the writer chooses to focus on those aspects of Spenser's poem that are haunted by ghouls, ghosts, and other grotesque monsters, as opposed to any noble Fair Folk. This is how you arrive at a stage setting that is meant to reflect the world as seen through a lens of madness and the supernatural. It was and remains one of the key tropes of Horror fiction. It's also something Poe is able to put to good use in the pages of his story. Throughout the whole runtime, the narrator keeps insisting that whatever else we as his audience may think of him, he's not mad. How could a madman commit a murder with such deliberate patience, after all? It's this obvious clash between the apparent insanity of the storyteller and the desire to maintain a sense of clear and calm lucidity that serves to generate a lot of the suspenseful tension in Poe's narrative.
He seems to have realized that there's nothing more unnerving than basing your story on the entire predicate of having to do no more than share a room with another person who might very well be a stark raving killer. As a result, it makes perfect sense that the sort of personal camera lens through which we view the proceedings of "The Tell-Tale Heart" via warped and distorted vision of an illogical logic. It would mean we shouldn't bat an eye if the secondary world of this story amounted to a landscape full of off-kilter, abstract angles, twisted imagery, and a series of figures so distorted that it's impossible for us to tell if we're looking at actual human beings, or else monsters dressed up in very poor and grotesque masks. This should give you a pretty good idea of the lens through which the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" views the world. This is a facet of the story that UPA animators Paul Julian and Pat Matthews picked up on right away, as can be seen from the good use he makes of it throughout the cartoon's short runtime. They seem to have realized right away that Poe was telling the story of a fundamentally unreliable narrator. Someone who looks at life through the eyes of madness.
This realization is key to both the cartoon's opening paragraph, as well as the artistic choices that Matthews and Parmelee decided to go with as their signature style, at least for this one outing. Before the picture itself begins, the audience is given a title card to read. It tells us the following. "The story is told through the eyes of a madman...Who, like all of us, believed he was sane". This is followed not long after by the first words of dialogue spoken by Mason's character. "True, I'm nervous. Very, very dreadfully nervous...But why would you say that I am mad"? These are the twin observations that Parmelee and Julian use for their efforts going forward. They made the wise decision to let it dictate the way the cartoon was animated. Although a better way to say it is that they both realized how Poe's words draws or paint Poe's baroque diction into its own, brilliant, abstract, Gothic life. I use the word painting here with very good reason. That's because the vast majority of this cartoon is less taken up with watching drawing's come to life than it is being led through series of portraits. Each one of them contains imagery that is of such a high quality that some of it really deserves to be hung on the wall of a professional art gallery. That's how good Matthews' artwork is. The best part about it, though, is also the most terrifying. That's when Matthews finds all these near unique and inventive ways of making the paintings almost come to life. It's like watching monsters try to crawl from their frames.
Sometimes the camera will zoom in on one scene only for it to slowly open and expand different room inside the house. Like a series of boxes hidden away within each other, and then opening like midnight flowers to reveal a number of dark secrets. Or else you'll get what starts out as a simple close-up shot of one of the story's cast of characters, yet as the camera lingers on it, the ink and paint that makes up the character's face begins to warp and distort until we're left with either a a human being that has turned into something out of a nightmare, or else one aspect of the character's features has taken on a hideous quality that is then used to fill the entire screen. This latter technique is use to good effect when Matthews chooses to focus in on the blank, pale eye of an old man. The artists and illustrators who worked on this adaptation seemed to have had an almost intuitive understanding of what made Poe's story work. As Adam Abraham demonstrates in his book-length study of UPA Studios, everyone who worked on this project just seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the source material.
Abraham says that "the completed film is one of UPA’s singular achievements. The Tell J Tale Heart is composed of a series of lingering camera moves and languorous dissolves over Paul Julian’s decayed, distressed, and disoriented paintings. The minimalist animation, contributed by Pat Matthews, is secondary to the layouts. In Parmelee and Julian’s imagery, we see through the eyes of the madman-narrator: The Tell-Tale Heart is a “first- person” film. Julian’s colors are few and highly controlled: black, burning yellow, and midnight blue predominate. When we first encounter the old man’s evil eye, white spidery lines emanate from it, expressionistically; then, in a series of graphic matches, the film dissolves from the milky eye to a decaying moon and then to a white pitcher on a counter that shatters suddenly. Long shadows of the never-seen narrator evoke the style of German expressionism; other scenes are purposefully surreal. When the dark deed is done, the act of violence is merely implied: the old man’s yellow-and-black bed sheet whirls madly. A limb flails; a head rolls past. “Then it was over,” the narrator purrs (105-6)". It is, in short, the case of the best minds coming together for the story.
Such is the nature of the finished product. In terms of any important pre-production information, the best background material out there is provided once more by Abraham. "Steve Bosustow said that he was reading Edgar Allan Poe on a family vacation; and when he returned to the studio, he was eager to adapt “The Raven.” Bosustow pitched the idea to designer-turned-director Ted Parmelee. Born in New Jersey, Parmelee had worked for Walt Disney Productions and Graphic Films. Parmelee joined UPA in 1950 and soon shared an office with Paul Julian. They discussed the Poe project and countered Bosustow’s plan with the notion of adapting “The Tell-Tale Heart” instead. Julian appreciated that Bosustow was “very open” and “accepting of things that looked like good, adventuresome ideas (104)". The best piece of information comes from what Abraham's sources reveal about the story's main adapter. The film's best contributions all came from the mind of one man.
"The madness of The Tell-Tale Heart found a perfect interpreter in Paul Julian. As Alison Julian said of her father, “He was creepy.” She recalled that he was prone to “clanging”—that is, rhyming words without logic—which can be considered a sign of mental illness. Julian “could recite the most obscure poetry for hours,” Alison recalled. When he read bedtime stories to his daughters, Julian chose selections from Gargantua and Pantagruel. Further, Bill Hurtz argued that Julian’s World War I sequence in The Four Poster “was the exploration for The Tell-Tale Heart Parmelee and Julian, as director and designer, complemented each other’s skills. The former “was excellent at camera movement,” according to Hurtz. Parmelee planned the film’s cross-dissolves and bits of animation. 60 But as Steve Bosustow noted, “Paul Julian was really the heavy” on The Tell-Tale Heart. Julian created around 75 percent of the layout drawings and painted every background. Bosustow declared the film to be “Paul Julian’s masterpiece (105)". That sound like the right judgment call, there. I'm not sure there's much else to add, except to give a good idea of just how well done this adaptation is.
In many ways, the best way to look at a film like this is to view it as something of a logical companion piece to Walt Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Bear with me for a second as I explain why that is. To start with, you'd surprised at the number of similarities each picture has common. Both of them are adaptations. Each picture is adapting either one of or else the most famous work of a celebrated American author. Both authors worked in the same genre of the American Gothic mode, and their respective works are now considered as quintessential expressions of the Horror format. Beyond these generic similarities, however, each film is able to share more than a few thematic concerns. Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving had a shared concern for exploring the dark underbelly of American life. In fact, it is more than easy enough to make the case that in creating the secondary world of Sleepy Hollow, Irving was pretty much pioneering the now familiar Horror trope of the quaint looking small town with a dark secret and/or troubled past. It's a concept that has been put to good use since its first appearance. Most notably by the likes Nathaniel Hawthorne or Mark Twain. Perhaps the most familiar explorations of this trope are to be found in the pages of Stephen King's It or Salem's Lot. All that either book does is to take Irving's initial concept forward into the modern era of Gothic fiction.
In the kind of setup that Irving pioneered, the basic crux is that the main setting is meant to serve as a microcosm of American society. A kind of pasteboard prop stage that allows the narrative to sometimes shine a light on the baser aspects of the American psyche. In Irving's case, what the author has accomplished is what might be termed one of the first group portraits of the national scene as conveyed in all the fine shades and tones of the Gothic genre. All that a writer like Poe does is to take that national snapshot of a troubled mind, and treat it in a literal fashion by zooming the focus in on the problems of one deranged individual. In that sense, it's not the the subject matter has changed at all. It's just that the focus of the narrative lens has now zoomed in on the particular, as opposed to the collective. Poe's unreliable narrator takes all of the hidden aspects that plagued Irving's small town community, and proceeds to take his audience for inside look at all of it in by giving it all the form of a pretty near pitch-perfect personification of American derangement. Even within Irving's original setup, a lot of the social tensions and alienation that define Sleepy Hollow find their expression through the exploration of what happens to Ichabod Crane. That story is all about a trio of persons discovering just how far their heart of darkness goes. In Poe's story, that journey into madness is complete and total. It's also worth mentioning that the denouement of each tale revolves around events whose explanation could be either completely natural, or else there's a genuine supernatural element involved.
I hope you're beginning to get a sense of what I mean when I say that both the UPA short cartoon and the Disney film have a lot in common. Aside from being what has to be a pair of the best stepping stones to introduce young viewers to the Horror genre, each of them carries a great deal of thematic overlap. This is true to the point where it's almost possible to go from the end of Disney's Sleepy Hollow adaptation, and from there jump right on in to UPA's Poe picture. The two of them together are both that good in terms of storytelling quality. Each of them offers a beginner's course in the American Gothic framework. A picture like Sleepy Hollow or "The Tell-Tale Heart" can be enjoyed both on its own terms, and for the rich thematic history it contains as part of a greater collective of Horror storytelling. A lot of this achievement is down to the talent that Stephen Bosustow, Paul Julian, and Pat Matthews. Much like how Irving found his ideal translator's in Walt Disney and the Nine Old Men, so it seems that Edgar Allan Poe's tale of terror found its perfect match with the help of the artists from UPA. For all of these reasons, I'm afraid I have no choice except to label 1953's version of Poe's story as perfect, perhaps even essential viewing for fans of the Horror genre. It's just that good.
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