Oscar Time

Now that my article has had a little breathing room, I can talk about one of the big news stories in the animation world this week: the 2010 Academy Award nominations. With five nominees in the Best Animated Feature category, five shorts vying for Best Animated Short, and either one or two animated films up for Best Picture - depending on whether you buy Cartoon Brew's argument or James Cameron's - it's a pretty exciting year for animation fans.

In case you haven't heard, here are the nominees for Best Animated Feature Film:

• Coraline - Based on the book by Neil Gaiman and directed by Henry Selick, this puppet animated film follows a young girl's journey to a world where everything seems better than the world she knows.
  
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox - This story of a fox longing for his younger, wilder days and the trouble it gets him, inspired by the Roald Dahl book into is the first foray into animation for director Wes Anderson.
  
  
• The Princess and the Frog - Disney's return to hand-drawn animation was directed by Ron CLements and John Musker, the team who brought us The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.
  
  
• The Secret of Kells - A relatively unknown hand-drawn film from Irish director Tomm Moore that tells the tale of a young boy and his quest to finish the famed Book of Kells.
  
  
• Up - Pixar's latest from director Pete Docter. You know what it's about, right?
  

If you're keeping track, that's two puppet animated films, two hand-drawn, and one computer animated. It makes for a nice reminder to the general public that feature animation isn't just computer animation. The other big news in animated features is that Up is also among the ten nominees for Best Picture. It's a great acknowledgment for a film I really enjoyed, but I don't see it winning the big prize. I don't think the Academy is ready to give their top award to an animated film just yet, which is why you have James Cameron tying himself in knots trying to claim that Avatar is not an animated film. Besides, they can still reward Up by giving it one of the six other awards it's up for, including Best Animated Feature, which I think it has strong chances of winning. I mean, look at it logically. Of all the Best Animated Film nominees, Up is the only one to also be nominated as one of the ten best films of the year, period. It's not a complete lock; Fantastic Mr. Fox has been getting a lot of praise from film critics and could give Up some stiif competition. But I think the Best Picture nomination gives Up a slight edge. For a long time, the Best Animated Short Film category was notable to the general public more for the animated characters who "presented" the award than the nominated films. As studios stopped making shorts - animated or otherwise - the nominees went from films you could see at your local theater to film that you had to seek out at animation festivals. But the short format has had something of a comeback in recent years, with studios like Pixar and DreamWorks creating new shorts to run in front of their animated films. And between DVD and the internet, it's much easer to see the animated shorts that may not be running in the local multiplex. This year, Cartoon Brew has links to all five nominees so you can view them online. The Best Animated Short Film nominees are:

• French Roast - A computer animated "slice of life" film from director Fabrice Joubert, who worked on The Prince of Egypt and the upcoming Despicable Me, among other films.
  
  
• Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty - A mix of computer and 2D animation (Flash, I believe) in which a old woman tells her granddaughter a bedtime story that deviates from the traditional version. Directed by Nicky Phelan.
  
  
• The Lady and the Reaper(La Dama y la Muerte) - Another computer animated film, this short tells the story of an elderly woman caught in the middle as a doctor and the Grim Reaper battle over her life. Directed by Javier Recio Gracia.
  
  
• Logorama - Yet more computer animation, set in a world where everyone and everything is a logo or product spokescharacter, and directed by François Alaux, Herve de Crecy, and Ludovic Houplain.
  
  
• A Matter of Loaf and Death - Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit return to the world of short films with a new career in beking and a new mystery as someone is killing off all the local bakers. Clay animation, as if you didn't know.
  

My guess for the film that will win is A Matter of Loaf and Death. The Academy has generally been kind to Wallace and Gromit and Aardman. None of the nominated films have visuals that feel all that innovative or unique, so the prize will likely go to the most filmgoer-friendly film with the strongest story. Which films should win Best Animated Feature and Best Animated Short? For now, that's for you to discuss in the comments.

Famous Firsts - Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo"

(I've decided to start announcing the winners of the previous week's trivia contest in a separate post, since my comments on them are getting longer.)

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving home and listening to a story on NPR about the 2009 selections for the National Film Registry. Every year, the National Film Preservation Board selects up to twenty-five films to be preserved for posterity at the Library of Congress. NPR mentioned a few of this year’s particularly interesting picks, including the Muppets’ big screen debut The Muppet Movie and Michael Jackson’s game-changing music video Thriller. Another film that got a brief mention was “a 1911 mix of live action and animation that influenced Walt Disney.” Curious, and slightly embarrassed that I didn’t immediately know what film was being described, I looked it up online once we got home. I discovered that the short in question was Little Nemo, which left me feeling both glad that the film would be preserved to be enjoyed by future generations and slightly annoyed at NPR. It turned out that their description was a very condensed version of the National Film Preservation Board’s own blurb on the short, but I still felt that it missed much of the point. I like Disney plenty, but I’m not a fan of the idea that in the world of animation, all roads lead to Disney. To suggest that animator Winsor McCay and his work are important chiefly because of their influence on Walt Disney is far from the whole story.

Winsor McCay was an amazingly prolific and influential artist, born sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s. Despite having very little formal art training, he became a newspaper cartoonist, producing a number of comic strips for various papers. His best-known creation is Little Nemo in Slumberland, which told the story of a young boy and his nightly visits to a fantastic dreamworld. The strip features superb draftsmanship and attention to detail, wonderfully intricate architecture, and a playful inventiveness in story and layout. Today, it is considered a sequential art masterpiece.

McCay developed an interest in the then fledgling medium of animation and partnered with J. Stuart Blackton – another animation pioneer, to create a short film based on MccCay’s comics. The National Film Preservation Board’s description of the resulting short as “a mix of live-action and animation” is somewhat misleading. It brings to mind shorts like the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell series or Disney’s early Alice Comedies: animated characters entering the live-action world or a live actor in an animated setting. Little Nemo is neither. It is two minutes of animation with a live-action frame story.

The title card identifies the film as “Winsor McCay, The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics,” though it is known to most people by the much less cumbersome title “Little Nemo.” The text goes on to proclaim McCay “the first artist to attempt drawing pictures that will move.” This is hyperbole at best and very strange, given that McCay’s co-director Blackton had himself experimented with using film to bring drawings to life. His Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is considered by some to be the first animated film and predates Little Nemo by at least five years. Blackton himself is not mentioned anywhere in the film, though the title card notes that the film was produced by the Vitagraph Company, which Blackton founded.



The live-action portion of the film deals chiefly with McCay explaining his idea for an animated short using his comic strip characters and then producing the drawings. Since there is no sound (beyond the jaunty, repetitive piano score attached to my copy of the short), the parts of the story that cannot be conveyed visually are explained in text. The story is a fictionalized version of the creation of the animated portion of the film. McCay explains his idea for creating moving film versions of his Little Nemo in Slumberland characters to his fellows artists, who laugh at him. He then demonstrates his drawing prowess by producing on the spot ink drawings of his creations. The text tells us that McCay promises his colleagues that he will return in one month with four thousand drawings that will create the illusion of movement. (This tight deadline is likely a gross exaggeration. Though McCay was capable of drawing very fast, a skill that was necessary for one of his other careers as a vaudeville “chalk-talk” artist, I’ve seen the actual time he spent working on this short piece of animation identified as not four weeks, but four years.) McCay sets about creating the four thousand individual drawings while enormous packages of drawing paper and barrels of ink are delivered to his studio. The packages, barrels, and door are labeled “drawing paper,” “ink,” and “studio,” for the audience’s convenience. Inside, McCay must deal with various interlopers whose nosing around threatens to knock over McCay’s numerous stacks of drawings and eventually does so. Finally, McCay presents his finished work to his peers.

Why bother with this fictional version of the film’s creation? My first thought was that it was intended as self-promotion for McCay. Selling his name to the public was an important aspect of all of McCay’s various careers. Showing McCay actually creating the animation could have been intended to create a stronger link in the minds of the audience between his name and his work. Animation was still very new to the public and few people understood exactly how it worked. So maybe the live-action footage was intended to both entertain and inform the public, filling out what would otherwise be a mere two minutes of animation with a fun and educational (if somewhat inaccurate) segment on the animation process. McCay may have simply wished to give himself some additional recognition for his hard work. This piece by Lauren Rabinovitz suggests that the live-action segments are further evidence of McCay the formalist. McCay’s comics are more focused on investigating and experimenting with the medium than the story itself. He was never afraid to call attention to or play with the structure of his comics, shattering panel borders and letting his hungry protagonists devour the letters from the strip’s title. So perhaps the scenes of McCay at work reflect the artist’s belief that the process and experimentation are as important as the finished product.

There’s an odd little moment before the animation begins in earnest. After McCay gathers his friends together and starts the camera rolling, an image of McCay’s character Flip appears line by line. But instead of continuing directly into the rest of the animation, the film then shows us McCay’s hand drawing the exact same image of Flip and sliding it into a three-sided wooden box, presumably to be filmed. It’s as if McCay is taking one last opportunity to remind his audience that no matter how magical the following scene may appear to be, he did actually draw the whole thing. The drawing of Flip is labeled “No. 1” referring back to McCay’s promise of four thousand drawings. The drawing of Flip suddenly goes from black and white to color. Since color film had not yet been invented, the film itself had to be painted by hand, one frame at a time.

Among the main characters in the Little Nemo comics and the animation is the Imp, an unfortunate racist caricature. In the strip, he is a boy from a tribe of cannibals who speaks either incomprehensible nonsense or fractured English. Fortunately, the Imp does not do anything particularly offensive in the animation and, like all of the characters, he never speaks. But he is still drawn as a sterotype of a native African, an image that would likely not have raised an eyebrow at the time of the film’s debut but looks horribly dated and ignorant today. I certainly do not approve of such imagery, but I also believe that art should be judged in the context of its time and not solely on the basis of whether or not it contains such problematic characters. Trying to ignore or erase the existence of racism in the past will neither change the fact that it happened nor prevent it from occurring in the future. If knowledgeable adults can be allowed to watch films like Gone With The Wind in spite of its rather idealized vision of the American South and the slave experience, then they should be able to watch Little Nemo (and Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, but that’s another article.)



As the animation starts, the words “Watch me move” appear above Flip’s head, which is pretty much all the animated segment of the film is. There is no plot whatsoever, just the characters cavorting about. Animation was still such a new thing at the time that audiences could be entertained just by the novelty of seeing drawings brought to life. Much of the animation consists of the characters chasing each other around, assembling onscreen, and magically distorting like funhouse mirror reflections. As the animation comes to an end, the camera zooms out to show McCay’s hand holding the final drawing, triumphantly labeled “No. 4000.”



So if there’s no story to speak of, what makes Little Nemo so special? As with McCay’s comics work, the visuals are what stand out. Not only is Little Nemo one of the earliest examples of an animated short; it’s also one of the most sophisticated of the early animated shorts. McCay’s drawings are amazingly detailed, and yet they move surprisingly well. From his very first actions of removing the cigar from his mouth and waving away the smoke, Flip looks like he exists in three dimensions. Details like Flip’s spiky tufts of hair and the Imp’s jewelry stay consistent as they run around. The distortions of the characters are not haphazardly drawn. They stretch and squash according to particular rules. While parts of their forms elongate, others compress at the top or bottom of the screen, depending on the direction they’re being stretched in. The motion isn’t always perfect: McCay seems to have trouble keeping Nemo’s large hat moving convincingly as he turns or bows his head. There are some jumps in the animation, which may be due to parts of the film being lost or damaged beyond repair over the decades. These are minor flaws though, and do not detract from the overall amazing quality of the work.

The blurb from the National Film Registry, along with many animation fans, notes how technically superior Little Nemo is t animated films that came before it. What I find equally stunning is how superior ir is to films that came after it. McCay would go on create more animation including Gertie the Dinosaur, widely regarded as the first animated character with true personality, but it would be years before the rest of the animation world would catch up with McCay. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, all American animation would utilize a much simpler style of drawing. Why? Because animation was becoming a business, a transition that McCay took a very dim view of. McCay saw the potential of animation to become a new art form and even imagined a day when the public would be so accustomed to moving art that they would regard works like the Mona Lisa as curious, static relics of a bygone era. But animation was growing into a studio product, and one man reportedly taking four years to make two minutes of animation was not a financially viable model. Dismayed by the commercialization of the medium, McCay later chastised his colleagues at a dinner held in his honor and wished them bad luck with their future endeavors.

To be selected for the National Film Registry, a film must be deemed significant either historically, aesthetically, or culturally. Little Nemo is a film that fits all three criteria. It is historically significant as an early work of American animation by one of the first masters of the medium. It is aesthetically significant because its visuals are literally years ahead of their time. And it is culturally significant both for helping to introduce the American public to animation and the animation process, and for influencing a new generation of animation pioneers, including – but certainly not limited to – Walt Disney. Little Nemo is certainly deserving of a place in the National Film Registry, where it can continue to amaze and inspire future animators for years to come.

Trivia Time! I’ll be pretty surprised if anyone – aside from a few of my animator friends – is familiar with the answer to this week’s trivia question. Little Nemo was one of two animated films to be picked for inclusion in the National Film Registry for 2009. What’s the name of the other film?

Copyright has expired on this film, but the images are taken from the DVD Animation Legend Winsor McCay

A Short, Of Sorts - Pixar's "George and A.J."

The week of Thanksgiving, with its feasts, visits from friends and relatives, and vacation time for my husband, has left me behind in my writing. I have a film review and a book review in the works, but for now, please enjoy my short comments on this short piece of animation.

Pixar’s George and A.J. was originally available as a special feature for customers who purchased Up through iTunes and has been making the rounds on the internet for about a week now, so perhaps you’ve already seen it. It’s a short cartoon about the two nurses who were supposed to take Up protagonist Carl Fredrickson to the Shady Oaks Retirement Village, only to be thwarted by Carl taking to the skies, house and all. The story shows the impact of Carl’s departure on George, A.J., and the local seniors.





As you may have noticed, this cartoon is pretty different from most of the other Pixar shorts like Partly Cloudy - the short that ran alongside Up in theaters, or Dug’s Special Mission - the short that debuted on the film’s DVD and Blu-ray release. It’s hand-drawn rather than computer animated. There is very little actual animation and no real lip-synch. And the voice cast is different. What’s going on here?

My theory, which a lot of animation fans seem to share, is that this “short” wasn’t really intended as a fully animated short, but an animatic. An animatic, also called a story reel or a Leica reel (after the German camera brand “Leica”), is a version of an animated film, short, TV show, or other project in which the storyboards are filmed and edited together to make a simple “rough draft” version of the final film. A “scratch” dialogue track will usually be recorded as well. This is a temporary version of all the dialogue in the film, usually acted by story artists or other people around the studio. The animatic is useful for showing interested parties how the film is shaping up and for checking to see how the story reads on film. Storyboards on their own can give the filmmakers some idea of what’s working and what isn’t, but an animatic can provide additional insight into how well the various ideas are working without the benefit of the story artist being there to pitch and explain them. Are the characters interesting? Is the story clear and easy to follow? Do the camera angles help to explain the action and emotion of the scene? Does he pacing of each scene work? Do some scenes go on too long or end too quickly? With the help of the animatic, these questions can be answered and chances can be made before the costly and time-consuming process of animation begins.

If George and A.J. is an animatic, it’s a very polished one. Most animatics are not in color, except for some special cases, such as when they are being used to pitch the idea to studio higher-ups. Computers have made it easier to depict important movements in animatics, allowing artists to move characters and objects around over a background or even create simple animations – usually just two or three drawings, without having to redraw the entire scene. Even so, George and A.J. features a lot more detailed motion than the average animatic, such as the way George and A.J.’s car tilts slightly as it comes to a stop or the motion graphics that lead in to the news story about Carl’s great escape. While I don’t know for certain, I suspect that some version of this animatic was used to pitch the idea for a short, but never got approved for full animation. Then when a bonus feature was needed for the iTunes release of Up, the animatic was pulled out, possibly reworked a little, and presented as a short cartoon.



Why wasn’t George and A.J. made into a fully animated short? I don’t really know. One possible reason is that the characters were thought to be too obscure. George and A.J. have just one brief scene in Up, while Dug – who stars in the short that was made for the film’s home release - is a very important character, as well as the most merchandised one from the film. It’s not clear whether George and A.J. would have been hand-drawn or computer animated had it been made as a full-fledged short. If computer animation was the ultimate goal, then maybe it would have been too expensive. Dug’s Special Mission uses existing character models and sets from Up. While some of the characters, props, and sets in George and A.J. could have been reused from up, the reporter, the various old folks, their houses, the cat lady’s cats, and all of their various methods of escape would have to be designed and built, costing both additional money and additional time that may not have been available. The Wikipedia article about the short points out a couple of inconsistencies between the short and the movie, though none of them are so crucial to the plot of the short that they could not have been altered. There could be any number of reasons why the short didn’t get further along in production, and unless Pixar decides to tell us, we may never know.

So now that we have an idea of why George and A.J. looks the way it does, the remaining question is “Does it hold up?” Can the appeal of the story and characters overcome the lack of Ed Asner and full animation? I think so. I really like the idea of Carl’s example inspiring other seniors to figure out ways to make their homes mobile and take off. It may not be very profound or even the best short Pixar has ever produced, but it has enough fun ideas to fill out its allotted time. My one wish is that there was some kind of clip of the director before the short explaining why it looks the way it does. I can make an educated guess, but I can’t help but worry that some people might be led to believe that Pixar just doesn’t know how to do hand-drawn animation or that this is an example of what it looks like when they “use their computers” to make traditional animation. That one gripe aside, George and A.J. is worth a look. It’s both and entertaining short film and an interesting look into one part of the animation process.

All images in this article are copyright Disney/Pixar.

Short Takes - Simon's Cat

I'm running behind on the latest article and feeling a bit under the weather to boot. (It's nothing serious and nothing related to the flu or pigs.) So while I rest up until I'm feeling well enough to finish the latest article, please enjoy the latest Simon's Cat cartoon, or the whole lot of them if you've never seen them before. These entertaining shorts go beyond just "the cute/funny/annoying things cats do" with appealingly simple drawings and excellent comic timing.

Why I Love Animation: The Tell-Tale Heart

The world of animation is an ever-changing one, with long held assumptions about the medium constantly being challenged by new generations of artists. Sometimes these changes take effect gradually, the new idea passing through many hands and many different projects before finally taking hold with the general public. Computer animation, for example, did not begin with Pixar any more than hand-drawn animation began at Disney, but it took Toy Story to convince the world that a computer animated film could be both a critical and commercial success. But in some cases, an entire movement or concept in animation really can be traced back to one individual or studio. UPA is one such studio. Though their name and work may not be well known to the modern public, UPA was almost solely responsible for creating a graphic style of animation that still influences the medium to this day.

Founded in the early 1940s, UPA was born in part from the 1941 Disney animators’ strike. In addition to their dissatisfaction with Disney’s labor practices, some of these artists felt that Disney’s dedication to naturalism in animation was too restrictive and too pervasive in the industry. Former Disney layout artist John Hubley and other several other ex-Disney artists founded Industrial Film & Poster Service, which was later renamed United Productions of America. At their new studio, these animators pursued a radically different graphic style of animation that drew more inspiration from modern art of the time than from real life. Taking inspiration from Chuck Jones’s groundbreaking short The Dover Boys, UPA also pioneered the “limited animation” style, which uses a more limited number of movements, fewer drawings per movement, and more animation cycles that “full” animation. The UPA style had a huge influence on studio animation throughout the 50s and 60s and limited animation became an invaluable tool for studios trying their hand at producing animation for television, which requires a much smaller budget and faster production schedule that theatrical films or shorts.

(Please note that the terms “full” and “limited” animation are not quality judgments. Limited animation can be used to amazing effect while full animation can be absolutely terrible if the execution is poor. These are not “good” and “bad” animation styles, merely different approaches to animation. To learn more about limited animation and its history, check out parts one and two of an essay on the subject from Between The Frames, the TallGrassRadio Studios production blog.)

Today, UPA’s most well known works are the Mr. Magoo cartoons and Gerald McBoing-Boing - the story of a boy who speaks in sound effects instead of words based on a story by Dr. Seuss. Gerald McBoing-Boing and several of the Mr. Magoo shorts are excellent cartoons and still hold up well today. The only thing that has changed is how surprising the graphic imagery and limited animation feel. Since these cartoons were made, several generations have grown up with TV animation and are comfortable with the style of flat drawings and reduced movement that UPA pioneered. The only way to understand now how new and revelatory cartoons like Gerald must have seemed to audiences of 1951 is to imagine yourself in that time, when the cartoons of Disney and Warner Brothers set the standard and all other studios pretty much followed suit. Since then, the UPA style has been adapted or outright copied by everyone from Hanna-Barbera to Disney and Warner Brothers themselves and what was once new and challenging now feels familiar and inviting. But there is still at least one UPA short which manages to remain surprising and shocking, because is it both unlike any other UPA cartoon and unlike any cartoon I have ever seen, even to this day.

I was already familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart," a story of murder, guilt, and madness. I knew from a couple of animation books that UPA had made an animated short based on Poe’s classic tale. But until a few years ago, I had never seen it. All I had were a few still images, none of which really prepared me for what the film itself would be like. I came across the short almost by accident. My husband and I had picked up the special edition of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy and were surprised and delighted to find that it included four UPA cartoons which the title character watches during the film. The included shorts were Gerald McBoing-Boing, two later Gerald McBoing-Boing, cartoons, and The Tell-Tale Heart. I still can’t think of a better way to see this film – except for maybe projected on a big screen in a theater – than coming across it unexpectedly and watching it with all the lights turned off and barely a clue as to what we were about to see.

I was stunned. I was amazed. I was completely in love with this film.



Even were it not for the opening text – almost a warning explaining the film’s origins in the Poe short story and introducing it as the tale of a madman who “like all of us” thought himself perfectly sane, the film’s dark nature would be clear from its first frame. A tall house sits completely alone on an impossibly low and otherwise empty horizon line against an ominously darkened sky. In the foreground is an ornamental urn atop a pedestal, almost like a grave marker. As the credits begin, the camera draws back and house and statuary are shown in an empty picture frame sitting on an easel, perhaps a nod to Magritte. The soundtracks starts with the distant tolling of a bell, then gives way to discordant music, completing the feeling of foreboding.

The story begins with a man’s voice, a human shadow against a dark blue background, and a bright white moth fluttering around. The moth flies up close to the camera. A human hand, rendered in stark white highlights and black shadow, snatched the moth from the air. This first scene establishes a number of the film’s key concepts. Obviously it introduces our narrator the madman, and the idea that he does not understand that he is insane or why anyone else would think so. It also introduces the theme of light and shadow, which will be present throughout the film. There are several scenes in which there are no moving characters, only shadows and light. Here we have a white moth and a man who is seen almost exclusively as a shadow who snatches the moth from the air. The final point this opening scene makes is that the entire film is shown directly from the madman’s point of view. All that we see of our narrator is his shadow and his hand coming out to seize the moth after it flies into the camera, his eyes. This is one of the most chilling alterations from the original story. Poe puts the reader in the role of someone the madman is speaking to, giving readers a view into the madman’s twisted mind, yet keeping them at a comfortable distance. In the film, we still get the impression that the madman is speaking to someone. He starts out admitting that he is quite nervous, then asks “But why will you say that I am mad?” But “you” here is not the audience. We never see the madman’s face, or anything other than what he sees. “You” could be the moth for all we know. In the film, there is no safe distance from which to observe this man and his insanity. We are the madman.



The madman then introduces us to his victim, the old man with whom he lived. By the madman’s admission, he did not kill the old man over any slight – real or imagined – or any desire to possess whatever wealth the old man had. His only quarrel was with the man’s one strange, discolored eye. The actual movement of the character is minimal. The old man is briefly shown walking, but he doesn’t turn his head to reveal the offending eye. Instead, the light shifts from one side of his face to the other.



Seeing what the madman sees also gives us access to his subjective view of the world around him. Thin white tendrils grow out from the eye and branch across the screen like cracks in glass. A full moon decays into a crescent in a series of still images that fade into one another. Juxtaposition or cross-fading of still images is another technique the film uses again and again. From the moon, we go to an inky black and white vision of the old man and his horrible eye as the madman sees them, then to a white pitcher sitting on a dresser in skewed perspective. As the madman tells us how the eye was inescapable, “everywhere, in everything,” the camera zooms in on the pitcher, which lies broken on the floor in the next frame. When the madman concludes “Of course, I had to get rid of the eye,” we may not agree with him, but we can understand how he came to that conclusion, having seen the way he views the world.

The madman’s belief that he is not mad rests largely on his perception of what qualities madmen do and do not possess. Madmen are easily agitated and often hysterical, but he insists that he can tell his story calmly, even though it soon becomes clear that he cannot. Madmen have no patience, but he waited for seven nights after deciding upon his plan before putting it into action. The very fact that he had a plan seems to be an argument against his madness, if madmen act on wild impulse.



Shadows continue to play an important role. Only the madman’s shadow advances towards the silhouette of the old man over a background that is the barest suggestion of a room, a window, and floorboards, which will feature in the story later on. Other important imagery gets highlighted as well: the old man has a white pitcher identical to the on the madman smashed for its similarity to the eye. We see the old man’s bed, with its particularly shaped footboard and checkered bedspread. The madman relates his nightly ritual of secretly looking in on the old man as he sleeps and for once, his presence is represented not by shadow, but by the light that moves up the stairs and peers through the open door. Time is another major player in the story. The madman says that his nightly observation of the old man took place “in the hour of the slowest clock.” Shadows and time come together as the old man’s shadow spills out across the floorboards in stages to represent the madman’s week of patient waiting passing by. The face of a clock decays much like the full moon compared to the eye earlier, revealing its slowly turning gears as the madman describes the slowness of his movements as time itself grinding to a stop. When the old man is suddenly startled awake by the fluttering of a moth in front of the madman’s lantern and the madman snatching it from the air, the madman remains motionless for a full hour to avoid being seen and talks of being able to “feel the earth turn.”

It is impossible to discuss The Tell-Tale Heart without talking about James Mason in the role of the madman. Mason seems determined to put everything he possibly could into the performance, yet he does so without ever striking a false or hammy tone. The script itself is greatly changed from Poe’s original text, so much so that hardly a sentence remains that is completely intact. I am not sure what the reasoning behind this decision was, but one of the results is that some of Poe’s more archaic and verbose passages are lost, freeing up the visuals to tell their part of the story and Mason to give a tour-de-force performance that feels entirely natural. What Mason gives the story in place of what has been taken out is a tone of voice that brings out aspects of the character not evident in the original. Mason’s madman starts off with the calm retelling of his story that he believes will prove him sane. But as the story unfolds, he not only grows more agitated, but turns from being the narrator of past events to being completely present in the moment he is describing. He goes from describing his slow, careful movements as he enters the old man’s bedroom on that last fateful night to crying out in alarm when the disturbance of the moth threatens to unravel his plans. Neither the visuals of this film nor Mason’s performance can exist without the other. Mason’s narration becomes especially crucial when the madman is waiting silently in the darkness and there is nothing on the screen but black for nearly 20 seconds. It is he who makes clear the madman’s growing sense of dread as he hears the old man’s heartbeat grow louder and louder and begins to suspect that his victim and the entire world are aware of his presence and intentions, while abstract veiny patterns throbbing on the screen in time to the increasingly louder heartbeat give visual emphasis to the madman’s torment.



The actual murder is shown with the most actual animation in the film. The camera leaps past the white pitcher to where the terrified old man is huddles in his checkered bedspread. The distinctive black and yellow pattern not only makes the location – and later, the old man’s corpse wrapped in the bedspread – easy to recognize; it also gives definition and meaning to the swirls of black and yellow punctuated by the thrust of an arm and a ghoulish head that are the murder of the old man. There is no blood or weapon, but the stabbing staccato notes of the soundtrack, followed by a shot of the bedspread falling over a still hand, leaves no doubt of what has happened, even before the madman tells us that the heart was now still and the eye dead.



Numerous fans and critics have compared the style of this short to that of Salvador Dali and I think the resemblance is most striking in this shot. (I’ve reconstructed the complete artwork from the pan so you can see the whole thing.) The old man’s corpse, covered by the checkered bedspread, lies on the wood floor. Nearby are his bed and an overturned black table, both of which we’ll be seeing again. The white bedsheets are strewn over the window shutters, winding around to the top, where the shutters twist and skew strangely. The walls and ceiling are gone, leaving the room fully open to the night sky. “I was free,” says the madman and the absence of the walls could be seen as evidence of that freedom. But the full moon, already associated with the eye in our minds, looks down unimpeded over the whole scene. Even if the madman does not realize it, we know that his deed has not gone unnoticed and his freedom will not last.

No sooner has our narrator concealed the body beneath the floorboards and set the room back in order than a knock on the door draws his attention. “So soon?” he muses, bringing the theme of time back into the narrative. The neighbors heard a scream and called the police to investigate. The madman sounds as calm as we ever hear him as he easily explains both the scream and the old man’s absence. Our only clue to his inner fears is in the visuals, where the policemen turn from realistically rendered figured to rough black and white renderings of fragments of faces, brows drawn low and eyes staring accusingly. His voice does not betray any agitation until the moment the policemen are about to leave and, curiously, the madman asks them to stay for a cup of hot tea. Is he so completely convinced that he has committed the perfect crime that he can’t resist flaunting his success? Or is his reasoning, like his madness, beyond even the madman’s comprehension?



A dropped teacup lying shattered on the floor echoes the shattered white pitcher from earlier in the film and kicks off the madman’s downfall. The return of the heartbeat is represent by the repeated fall of single drops of water, though we never know if this is the real source of the sound. It hardly seems to matter. The madman is convinced that the sound is real, that he knows what it is, and that the policemen can all hear and identify it as well. The madman’s descent is portrayed through a series of nearly still images around the room: the table, the spilled tea on the floorboards, a shot of the whole room with the camera drawing closer and closer, step by step. At last, the madman can take it no longer. He screams out his confession and reveals the body in its checkered shroud to the policemen, now portrayed as dark, seemingly headless figures. They cast long shadows over the newly uncovered corpse as the madman wails “It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

The next shot is of a metal surface with two neat lines of bolts, much like the two neat lines of buttons on the jackets worn by the policemen. We hear the madman repeat his admission from the beginning of the film that he is very dreadfully nervous. The camera pans up and to the left as the madman’s hand slams against the metal surface. A small, barred, window is revealed in what we now realize is a door, just like the other we can see through the window. It is now the madman’s only view of anything or anyone in the world outside of his cell. There is still no clear addressee as he plaintively asks “But why will you say that I am mad?”



The greatest achievement of UPA’s The Tell-Tale Heart is that it sheds a light on the story that even Poe’s original tale never does. The reader of Poe’s work is presented with the horror of conversing with a madman who thinks that he can prove that he is sane and his actions justified. The animated short introduces the new horror of being the madman so thoroughly trapped by his own madness that he cannot see what is wrong with him. Because we have literally experienced the whole series of events through his eyes, we can even sympathize with his predicament, condemned as insane and locked away for reasons he cannot understand. He is still just as frightening as he was when Poe created him, but it is just as frightening to think that our confidence in our own sanity may not reflect reality, that the way we see ourselves could be completely different from how the rest of the world sees us.

The passage of time is not always kind to visual innovation. What was once cutting edge and exciting can become conventional and familiar at best, dated and forgotten at worst. Some animation survives because of its solid story and characters, elements that stand the test of time when state-of-the-art visuals have become commonplace. It is a rare film that retains its power to shock audiences with its visuals and engage them with a compelling story over fifty years after its release. The Tell-Tale Heart is one such film and anyone who makes the effort to track it down is in for a rare treat.

All images in this article are copyright Columbia Pictures Television.

"Brave Little Tailor" - The Measure of a Mouse

"Remember, he's just a mouse." - Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse celebrated his 80th birthday last year. With countless appearances in short cartoons, feature films, television shows, comics, theme parks, and various other media, Mickey has stepped into roles from amateur pilot to master of ceremonies, band conductor to ghost exterminator, apprentice to the sorcerer to teacher of preschoolers, average little guy to corporate symbol. With such a long and prolific career, it can seem hard to define Mickey as a single personality. But there are milestone moments in the Mouse’s history that give us a picture of who Mickey was at the time and who he ultimately is.

Brave Little Tailor has long been considered one of the classic Mickey Mouse shorts. Animations fans and critics hold it in high regard. It was nominated for an Academy Award the year it was released. Most merchandise depicting Mickey through the ages includes him as he appeared in this cartoon. The short expertly combines humor and drama and focuses on narrative at a time when many short cartoons concentrated mainly on gags. In both story and visuals, it is one of the best Mickey Mouse cartoons.



Right from the title card, we get an idea of what kind of story this is going to be. On one side of a heraldic coat of arms, we see a knight in armor, though his lanky build and squat-legged stance remind us that he is very much a cartoon character. On the opposite side is Mickey, clothed in a baggy shirt and feathered cap. With an air of relaxed confidence, he leans on a pair of oversized scissors. (Audiences of 1938 were quite familiar with Mickey and knew that he was almost never the size of a real mouse.) We can easily tell that the story following will be set in the magical world of knights and dragons. But more than that, we see the traditional hero, represented by the knight, and our hero Mickey, the ordinary little guy who becomes a hero without really intending to.

A sign is posted on a stone wall reading “Citizens Beware! Giant at large!” Alongside the sign is a poster depicting an enormous foot. The shadows of the townsfolk move about over the wall and the two posters as the villagers themselves worriedly discuss the giant’s impending arrival. The use of shadows keeps the poster unobstructed so the audience can read it and heightens the sense of drama. Since shorts are, by their nature, short, economy of storytelling is important. Information needs to be presented qickly and clearly so that the audience gets it without a lengthy explanation that eats up precious time. So what is the central problem in “Brave Little Tailor”? A giant is coming to the village. Why is this a problem? Because, as the villagers lament, he will devour their crops and crush their town. The audience learns all of this from a few brief lines of dialogue and the first shot in the cartoon.

With the camera set further back, the large crowd of fearful villagers is revealed. The image of the foot is shown to be just part of a life-sized image of the giant taking up nearly the whole stone wall it’s posted on. Showing the giant and full size illustrates just how much of a problem he poses, but his sagging shoulders, tiny eyes, and slightly slack jaw suggest a giant who is light on grey matter rather than cruel and murderous. He looks more confused than anything. Animated shorts at this time were still primarily humorous. So while the giant still poses a real threat, he isn’t going to be as formidable a foe as a villain in a feature length animated film would be. He’s big, which makes him a threat, but that’s it.

So where is out hero in all of this? Staring up at the picture of the giant and thinking what a great adventure it would be to try and capture him? Wondering what kind of reward is offered for saving the town from this menace? At the castle, offering his services to the king? No, no, and no. Not even close.



One street over from the crowd is the tailor’s shop. Mickey is at work, whistling a happy tune as he sews. Thoughts of giants, adventure, and rewards couldn’t be further from his mind. The rest of the townsfolk may be worrying about the giant, but Mickey is just an ordinary tailor and his problems are much more mundane. All he wants to do is fix the garment he’s working on, but a small swarm of flies is buzzing around his head and distracting him. Though he seems happy enough with his life, Mickey is clearly pretty low on the societal totem pole. Even tiny flies aren’t afraid to gang up on him, taunt him, and buzz him like a small army of fighter planes. But for once, Mickey has the advantage of size and strength over his foes. More importantly, he’s smarter than them. Mickey grabs two nearby flyswatters and hides them behind his back. Once the flies get close enough, he slaps the flyswatters together, catching the lot of them in between. The flies plummet to the ground. They hit the floor to the sound of six drumbeats and a final clash of cymbals. “Oh boy!” Mickey exclaims. “Seven!”

I should mention the design of Mickey in this short. This is one of the last cartoons to feature this incarnation of Mickey before he underwent his last major redesign. Steamboat Willie debuted ten years before this short did and Mickey did undergo some changes during that decade. He has gained his signature white gloves, his body is now more pear-shaped, and his snout is shorter and rounder. He is recognizable as the classic “retro” Mickey. His face is white rather than flesh-colored, a leftover from his black and white days. He also retains his older style eyes, which are a source of confusion to many people. Comparing the older design to the modern one, it looks as though the older Mickey has solid black eyes with no whites. But in fact, those aren’t his eyes; they’re his pupils. Back in Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho – the first two Mickey Mouse cartoons produced and originally silent - Mickey had a line running down from the point in the center of his forehead that split above his nose into two curves that met up with the points at his cheeks. These lines defined the whites of his eyes, a look very similar to Felix the Cat. For Steamboat Willie, the lines disappeared, resulting in a Mickey much closer to the one we know today. But the black dots remained his pupils and would move around the white area above his cheeks and snout as Mickey looked in various directions. Confusing matters further, when Mickey blinks in this cartoon, the arcs of his eyelids only appear to go from one side of his pupil to the other, unlike Minnie’s, which reach fully across her whites.

Three of the townsfolk have gathered outside of Mickey’s shop window. One of them is asking his friends if they have ever killed a giant and they shake their heads no. It is that exact moment that Mickey chooses to fling open his shutters and announce to the world “I killed seven with one blow!” He’s probably expecting the public to be impressed with his skill, but even Mickey is a little confused with how surprised the bystanders seem and how quickly they rush off to tell everyone they know.

The whole town has soon heard the story of how the tailor slew seven giants with a single blow. The news finally reaches the palace guards and a knight who looks very much like the one from the title card. The knight races into the palace and upstairs to the throne room. The king and his daughter, Princess Minnie, look dejected and worried, just as concerned as the townsfolk about the whole giant issue. In his rush to tell the king what he’s heard, the knight trips and slides across the floor. He crashes into the steps in front of the two thrones, leaving his armor a pile of refuse. He tells the king what he has learned and the king orders that the tailor be brought to him.

The throne room is now crowded with onlookers watching as Mickey makes his appearance before the king. The king himself looks skeptical, perhaps not convinced that this little guy killed seven giants single handedly. But Princess Minnie is immediately smitten, clasping her hands and beaming at the nervous tailor. Mickey is fidgeting with his hat in his hands, likely wondering why the king is so interested in his fly killing prowess. The king asks, “Did you kill seven at one blow?” Mickey hesitantly replies, “Yes, your honor” adding “And how!” while swinging his fist through the air to add some punch to the statement. “How” is exactly what the king is wondering, and he asks Mickey to explain how he did it.

This is a precarious point for the story. In order for the plot to work, Mickey needs to go a little while longer without learning that everyone else thinks he killed seven giants and Mickey himself can’t reveal that all he really did was kill seven flies. But the king has no reason to avoid mentioning giants and Mickey has no reason to conceal the actual nature of his triumph. If the characters continue to speak in vague generalities without any reason to, the story could start to feel very forced.

Fortunately, Mickey’s performance avoids this potential misstep. To some degree, Mickey does believe that his ability to kill seven flies is a big deal. Now he’s been brought before the king because of it, so it must be an even bigger deal than he thought. This may be the only time Mickey ever gets an audience with the king, so while he’s not going to lie about what he did, he is going to make the most of his story. And don’t forget, Walt Disney himself is still voicing Mickey at this point. Many of the story artists who worked with Walt talked about his ability to act out the characters being discussed. So here is Walt Disney the storyteller putting himself into the role of Mickey, who is himself telling a story. His acting talents and the animator’s skills combine to sell a scene that could have easily come off as false and awkward.

Mickey doesn’t merely explain how he performed his impressive feat. He looks above him and spreads his arms as he tells how he found himself surrounded by his foes. He dodges back and forth, describing how they came at him from the right, then the left. He punches at the air so furiously that he falls over, but he doesn’t miss a beat. “They were right on top of me!” he narrates, putting up a hand to fend off an imaginary attack. The king is completely engrossed in Mickey’s tale, biting his nails and wiping sweat from his brow as Mickey tells how he at last emerged victorious. Princess Minnie claps enthusiastically. Mickey finishes his story with a triumphant swing of his scissors. He leans on them and soaks up the crowd’s cheers and admiration. It’s his fifteen minutes of fame, before he goes back to life as a tailor.

After motioning for the crowd to settle down, the King makes his proclamation. He proclaims Mickey “Royal High Killer of the Giant.” In a delayed reaction, Mickey’s scissors slip out from under him and he falls to the ground, stunned. He’s now aware of the mistake and tries to stammer out the truth, but the king interrupts him. Mickey will be rewarded, he decrees, with one million “golden pazoozas”, the local currency. Mistaking Mickey’s continued stammering for haggling, the king offers two million pazoozas, then three, all the way up to six. The king is becoming desperate when his daughter tugs at his arm and whispers to him. He amends his offer to include Princess Minnie’s hand in marriage. Mickey is even more stunned, but Minnie is clearly enthusiastic about the idea she suggested. She runs over to Mickey and kisses him repeatedly, leaving red lipstick marks all over his face. Money may not have been enough to convince Mickey to take on a giant, but love? Mickey stumbles backwards in a stupor of joy. Picking up his fallen scissors, he brandishes them like a sword, accepting the job.



Throngs of well-wishers turn out to cheer Mickey on as he strides out the town gates. Smiling and waving, he is still full of confidence, assuming he can stop thinking about Princess Minnie long enough to remember what he has to do to win her hand. He’s partway down the drawbridge, still waving to the admiring masses, when the doors slam shut behind him. They’re heavy doors; it took two guards to push each one open. But they close with remarkable speed. In that instant, Mickey’s confidence evaporates. The impossibility of the task and the fact that he is now totally alone both come crashing down on him. He dashes back to the doors and pounds on them furiously. Another burst of cheering erupts and Mickey looks up to see his adoring fans waving at him from atop the castle walls, including Princess Minnie. It’s too late to turn back now, so Mickey starts off again. “Well, so long,” he says with a nervous smile. “I’ll be seeing you.” Looking back one last time he adds a final, worried, “I hope.”

This marks the end of the story’s setup. Through misunderstanding, our hero finds himself assigned to a task he is woefully unprepared for. He now has adequate motivation to defeat the giant. He wants to win the hand of the lovely princess. But he’s in over his head. His big accomplishment in life was killing a bunch of flies. To his new opponent, it’s Mickey who is the insect. Even the flies fought in a group, but Mickey is all on his own. Sitting on a rock, Mickey sighs and states his predicament explicitly for the first time: he has no idea how to catch a giant.

As Mickey sits and worries, the ground beneath him shakes in time with booming footfalls. A huge shadow passes over him. Mickey looks up in alarm and runs just in time to avoid being crushed beneath an enormous sandaled foot. He keeps running as the giant continues his stroll, crushing rocks and trees in his path and creating enormous waves as he walks through the water while Mickey flees in a convenient rowboat. The giant hasn’t even noticed Mickey yet, demonstrating again that he is a problem mainly because he is so enormous and that Mickey is seriously outmatched. The giant has no idea that Mickey exists, but he could still kill the mouse simply by taking a walk.

Mickey takes refuge in a cart of pumpkins as the giant sits down on a small farmhouse, which bends under his considerable weight. The giant still does not look like a particularly intelligent fellow, a suspicion that is confirmed when he spies the pumpkins and remarks “Mmmm! Food!” followed by a dopey, low-pitched laugh. He grabs a handful of pumpkins and Mickey and, without ever noticing the mouse, tosses them all into his mouth. Mickey narrowly escapes being swallowed by grabbing onto the giant’s uvula. Next, the giant uproots a nearby well and drinks its contents down. Mickey is swept away with the water and only escapes the giant’s stomach by grabbing onto the bucket and rope that are still attached to the well. The giant tosses aside the well with Mickey still in the bucket. Mickey attempts to hide in a tarp-covered haystack, but the haystack is the next thing to catch the giant’s attention and he bellows “Smoke!” He grabs the haystack, the tarp, and Mickey, and rolls the whole thing into a giant-sized cigar. Lifting the roof of a small house, he picks up a pot-bellied stove and uses it as a lighter. The smoke from the cigar he’s trapped in causes Mickey to cough and sneeze, blowing the cigar apart and at last revealing Mickey to the giant.



The fight is on, though from the giant’s point of view, it’s less of a battle and more of an annoyance. Mickey jumps onto the giant’s nose and tries to maintain his balance as the giant contorts his huge face in an effort to get Mickey off. The giant reacts to Mickey much as a normal sized human would to a fly, like the ones Mickey himself slew. Mickey continues to struggle with just the giant’s facial features, swinging from one of his eyebrows, getting his foot caught in a fold of skin when the giant furrows his brow and sliding down into the giant’s hand when the brow becomes smooth again. The giant closes his hand around the mouse and brings it up to his face. It could well be curtains for our hero, but when the giant opens his hand again, Mickey makes his first attempt at being the brave knight he has been mistaken for. “Don’t move!” he squeaks. “I got you covered.” He stabs at the giant’s nose with his scissors, but the move produces nothing but a loud “honk”.

The giant tries to squash Mickey between his palms as Mickey narrowly escapes into his sleeve. As we saw in the title card, Mickey is no knight in shinning armor. He can’t defeat the giant in a head-on fight. So what is Mickey? Mickey is a tailor. He has the tools of his trade at his disposal, and he may just have the smarts to outwit his foe.




Finally going on the offensive, Mickey pokes his head out of the giant’s sleeve, whistles, and waves his hat around. The giant takes the bait and plunges his opposite hand into sleeve. Mickey at last uses his scissors for their intended purpose as he cuts a hole in the giant’s sleeve. The giant’s hand tears through after him. Discarding his giant scissors in favor of an equally oversized needle and thread, Mickey stitches up the hole around the giant’s hand to form an improvised straightjacket. While the giant struggles to free himself, Mickey climbs to the top of his head and anchors a second, much longer thread around the giant’s nose. Mickey swings around the giant repeatedly, tying him up from head to toe. Once he reaches the ground, Mickey gives a tug on the thread. Big as he is, the giant falls incredibly hard, creating hills from what was once flat land as he hits the ground. A chunk of earth from atop the highest of the newly made hills hits the giant on the head, knocking him out into a peaceful slumber. After checking to make sure his foe is really down for the count, Mickey sighs in relief, then brushes off his hands with the satisfaction of a seemingly impossible job well done.

The next scene is a carnival in progress, complete with a Ferris wheel and merry-go-round. The townspeople are celebrating the giant’s capture and the hero who accomplished the deed. They have found that the giant himself can actually be pretty useful, so long as he’s sleeping and securely bound and chained. His massive snores turn a windmill, which connects to a system of gears that powers all the rides. Mickey the hero has received his well-earned reward. The millions of pazoozas are nowhere to be seen, but Mickey was always far more interested in winning the Princess Minnie’s hand in marriage. They ride happily side-by-side on carousel horses and share a kiss. One the horse ahead of them rides the king. He is free of his worries about the rampaging giant and thrilled to have his daughter married to the brave giant killer she has fallen for. Without a care in the world, he joyfully licks his ice cream cone and cries out “Yippee!”



It is a happy ending all around. The townspeople no longer have to live in fear of the giant. The king successfully kept his people safe by finding a hero to vanquish the giant. Princess Minnie is happily married to the tailor she fell in love with at first sight. Even the giant seems reasonably content as he snoozes away, though he may not be quite so happy once he wakes up. And Mickey, the ordinary little guy who originally wanted nothing more than to fix clothing without being bothered by flies, has used the skills he already had to defeat the giant, save his homeland, earn himself a place in the royal family, and find true love.

All images from this article are copyright Disney.