The Tell-Tale Heart (1953)

As an animation enthusiast as much as a horror one, I have choice words for UPA. I understand how terribly popular they were fifty years ago, and how daring and unusual their pared-down visual style was at the time, but I’ve always felt that their trend toward more “economical” animation that was picked up by other studios of the era, Walt Disney in particular, did more to damage the industry and deprive it of its grandeur and spectacle than anything truly of merit.

But while their Mr. Magoo cartoons were fun and they produced a number of genuinely great cartoons (such as “The Unicorn in the Garden”), they did come out with one animated short so starkly different from anything else in their library that I almost feel that the “cost effective” blight UPA inflicted upon the animation industry of half a century ago was entirely worth it.

Because they produced an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” which to this day has not been equaled.

You know the drill: The caretaker of an elderly man in a large, empty house is driven to insanity by the old timer’s milky white eye. After disposing of his victim and stashing the body beneath the floorboards, he is summarily driven to all-consuming madness by the sound of a still-beating heart.

I’m not sure how my mom got a hold of this cartoon when I was a kid, but it was copied onto a Beta cassette alongside such inoffensive shorts as Droopy and Tom & Jerry. I watched the short repeatedly as a child and it absolutely freaked me the Hell out.

A surrealistic take on Poe’s story, the entire cartoon is presented from the point of view of the mad narrator (voiced by James Mason). You see everything as he does and the world of this cartoon is asymmetrical, dark, bizarre and utterly nightmarish. “The Tell-Tale Heart” utilizes UPA’s “limited animation” technique, but implements the lack of movement and dimensions in a far more creative and atmospheric manner than their typical children’s material. There’s a lot of camera work in this cartoon, as we pan across paintings of the vast and imposing old mansion (as the audience, we’ve been implanted inside the madman’s body, after all) and they use several lighting techniques to mask portions of the background paintings, revealing them slowly or suddenly depending on the narrative flow, to create a terrifying illusion of movement and horror even when, well, nothing is actually being animated.

The paintings that comprise the bulk of this cartoon are like something Stephen Gammell would draw if he worked in color, with a healthy dose of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali thrown in for good measure. As the film progresses and the narrator becomes more dangerously insane, the house-itself grows and changes in terrifying ways, culled from the darkest corners of some sick architect’s imagination. Things briefly cool down when the police show up and the narrator is forced to put on the façade of sanity, but we all know how that turns out, I’m sure.

But if I’m beginning to sound like this is a very “static” piece of animation, I don’t mean to put it that way. Yes, UPA liked to work with limited animation and yes there are a lot of environmental pans, but the real animation doesn’t come from character movement (though what little we see of characters being animated is surprisingly impressive). There are lots of unnerving overlays of things such as veins, webbing out across the frame, or the slow lengthening of the old man’s shadow creeping across the dusty floor, or the pulsing beat of some wet organ flashing momentarily across the screen. For an animated film with only a limited amount of frame-to-frame animation in it, Director Ted Parmelee ingeniously gets the most out of what he can and the result is something unique and darkly beautiful.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” was considered so abnormal and disturbing in its day that it was the first cartoon to ever be rated X in Great Britain. Controversies not-withstanding, it still managed to obtain an Oscar nomination in the States, though it lost out to Walt Disney’s “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” (which, ironically, was animated in Disney’s faux-UPA style).

Availability-wise, I guess it was on VHS back in the 90s if I somehow ended up with it when I was a kid. So far as DVD is concerned, I understand that it’s a bonus feature on the “Hellboy” set, though the downside is that you have to own “Hellboy” in order to get it. But for the cheap, there’s always You Tube!

Anyhow, for fans of unique horror animation or just surrealist horror in general, there’s really no competing with “The Tell-Tale Heart”. I’m rather disappointed that it didn’t inspire a trend toward darker horror-themed animation back in the 50s, because who knows what kind of cool cinema might have been produced in the near-sixty years since its premier had it gotten the ball rolling. Regardless, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a very special film and a very good horror flick, cartoon or not.

Grade: A (as in, “And that is why I will never own a bed sheet with black and yellow checkers on it”)