All aboard the POOOOOOOE TRAIN! Where my Attitude Era fans at? I have to think there's a Poe story/Papa Shango pun out there in the ether somewhere, just waiting to be grabbed... all I'm getting is The Tell Tale Hart Foundation? Piper's Pit and the Pendulum? (What About Me, What About) The Raven? I don't know - why is it so much easier with the old guys?
Anyhow, I figured I'd follow up yesterday's The Oval Portrait with another Poe-inspired film. This time, it's an animated anthology featuring five adaptations of his stories. You only get about 10-15 minutes for each story, so nothing goes terribly in depth. I'm not too familiar with Poe, but I have to assume everything here is abridged to some extent. Every story in Extraordinary Tales has its own look animation-wise. Stylistically, they aren't wildly different from each other, but they all have a slightly different feel. So regardless of if you like a particular story or not, you don't end up spending a lot of time on each one, and overall the film moves at a good pace. And all but one are narrated - some nerd-famous name will just read the story, and the animation more or less matches up (i.e. there aren't separate voice actors for each character). And, it isn't terribly gory or anything. It's PG-13, so you could probably watch it in school. So i there are any lazy high school lit teachers out there looking for something to do this Halloween...
My Synopsis: Five Poe Tales narrated and set to animation, featuring a wrap-around of Raven standing in for Poe (the credits say "Crow," but c'mon) - talking to a bunch of graveyard statues to set up each tale.
Elaborate Genre: Animated, PG-13 gothic horror anthology
Overall: Kind of cool. The stories are short enough and seem faithfully adapted (if not shortened up), so I don't know if it's going to wow any Poe-heads in that department. But the animation is always interesting to look at, and it moves from story to story quickly.
I don't want to get into plots here - you know the stories or can read them just about anywhere. But here's what you get in Extraordinary Tales:
"The Fall of the House of Usher" - narrated by Sir Christopher Lee
"The Tell-Tale Heart" - narrated by Bela Lugosi (!)
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" - narrated by Julian Sands
"The Pit and the Pendulum" - narrated by Guillermo del Toro
"The Masque of the Red Death" - featuring one line of dialogue by Roger Corman
One the whole, the animation straddles the line nicely between stylized and cheap. Extraordinary Tales is obviously not a 100 million dollar Pixar film, and looks a little sketchy at times. (imdb puts the budget at 2 million.) But generally speaking, the characters and backgrounds are designed in such a way (i.e. blocky heads and unwieldy body shapes) that the whole thing looks like an angular painting/composition rather than something that is attempting to look realistic. It may sound like I'm complaining, but I'm not. I thought it was a good way of dealing with the obvious limitations, and gives the whole film an arty feel.
"The Tell-Tale Heart" section is particularly striking. Not only because it's got the Lugosi narration - presumably from an old record, judging by the sound quality of it. But man, is it great to hear his voice. Visually, it's based on the art of Alberto Breccia, a comic book artist known as "the master of black and white." The whole story is told in stark blacks and whites only - and it looks *really* cool. I really don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
Horrorwise, I don't think there's much "scary" here. Truth be told, I've never really found Poe to be particularly scary - I think his waxing poetic goes too far over my head. So Extraordinary Tales is successful in my eyes by setting a tone akin to an old-fashioned radio-play and juxtaposing that with stylized visuals. I mean, you're not going to make a PG movie where a dude nearly gets cut in half by a pendulum, but most of this film feels almost kid-friendly to me.
But ultimately, it's a cool flick. You don't come across a lot of animated adult horror films - and oftentimes the ones you do seem to revel in the gore and the strangeness that can only be realized in animated form. But that's not Extraordinary Tales. It's not enthralling by any means, but it's a nice and mellow Halloween watch.
I would recommend this film.
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