#Gentle reader aminition series#

Similarly, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” for which Guillermo del Toro provides the voiceover, mutes the impact of that story by rendering what’s written as a first-person experiential account of horrific torture from a third-person perspective. (Don’t worry, Garcia doesn’t have the power to resurrect the deceased Usher was originally completed in 2012, before the screen legend’s passing.) Poe’s words and Lee’s delivery hint at metaphorical complexities that aren’t realized in Garcia’s unsuccessful stab at digitally sketched Gothic drawings, where sharp angles and skewed lines are flattened out by the computer animation. Take the opening film, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” narrated by Christopher Lee. Frankly, each of the five shorts grouped together here-connected by forgettable interstitial segments in which Poe’s soul appears in the form of a raven-suffers from the same problem: They’re all fairly conventional versions of 19th-century stories that still resonate today precisely because they defy convention. There’s nothing as extraordinary as “The Tell-Tale Heart” in Extraordinary Tales, a new omnibus of Poe-based cartoons overseen by journeyman animator Raul Garcia, whose credits range from Disney hits like Tarzan and The Lion King to that ’80s Saturday-morning staple, “The Smurfs.” That includes Garcia’s own version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which makes appealing use of stylized black-and-white animation (it resembles Sin City by way of The Matrix) without achieving the same level of psychological and emotional impact as Parmelee’s film.

As soon as you finish reading this review, proceed immediately to YouTube to watch this remarkable piece of animation history.)

(It’s both remarkable-and completely understandable-that the film received an X rating upon its initial release.

#Gentle reader aminition series#

Largely avoiding representational imagery, the seven-minute short filters the narrator’s half-crazed ramblings about a murder he’s committed through a series of abstract designs that heighten the horror of his self-inflicted predicament. In the early 1980s, for example, acclaimed Czech artist Jan Švankmajer employed his distinctive mix of live action and stop-motion animation in adapting a pair of Poe stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” A more populist adaptation is a version of “The Raven” that aired on the very first “Treehouse of Horror” episode of “The Simpsons” in 1990-a cartoon that manages to be both funny and faithful to the tragic source material.īut the crowning achievement in the Poe animated canon so far remains a chilling 1953 version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” directed by Ted Parmelee and evocatively narrated by James Mason. The work of Edgar Allan Poe has been well served by animators in the centuries since the famously tormented author’s demise in 1849.