The 1001 Animations Halloween Special! (#21-30)
Before you ask, no: as good as it is, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown will not be covered in this article (rest assured, though, it is on the list).
The time for spooks and specters has come again, boils and ghouls, and I have just the treat to mark the occasion! Those who have been watching my blog for a while will undoubtedly know about my recent explorations of the history of animation through a new series I’ve created called “1001 Animations You Must See Before You Die.” There are quite a few entries on the list that fit well with the spooky season, so I figured, why not talk about some of those to mark the occasion?
I’ve gathered quite a diverse collection for this 1001 Animations Halloween special. Some are relatively kid-friendly (a Disney short starring Mickey Mouse, two Cartoon Network classics featuring easily scared pink dogs and children lost in the woods, a stop-motion tale of a girl traveling to a deceptively perfect world, etc.). Others most certainly are not (a medieval tale of witchcraft and misogyny, a cartoon starring a demonic undead superhero, another late 80s anime classic starring murderous and horny demons, a hellish stop-motion descent into a chaotic underworld, etc.). But that’s the story with all episodes of this series, isn’t it?
So, without further ado, let us see what creepy cartoon creations we will be scaring each other with this Halloween season.
#51: Lonesome Ghosts
Artist credit: Don “Ducky” Williams
Animation style: Traditional 2D
Release date: December 24, 1937
Distributor: RKO Radio Pictures
Production company: Walt Disney Productions
Director: Burt Gillett
Writer: Dick Friel
Producer: Walt Disney
Music: Albert Hay Malotte
Remember that time Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy became Ghostbusters before it was cool? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Premiering just three days after Disney’s landmark feature-length debut, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the short sees the trio (voiced respectively by Walt Disney, Clarence Nash, and Pinto Colvig) running a “ghost exterminator” business, where they receive a call about a haunting at the local Old McShiver mansion on a cold winter evening. Unbeknownst to them, however, it is the quartet of ghosts haunting the mansion who have called them, hoping to relieve their boredom after having scared away all potential victims. Once the would-be ghost exterminators arrive, they are quickly subjected to all manner of spooky slapstick violence. But is there a way the trio of brave but incompetent ghost hunters can turn the tables on their terrifying tormentors?
It’s safe to say that this is one of the more popular classic Disney shorts, and it’s not hard to see why. Unlike previous horror-themed Disney shorts, such as “The Skeleton Dance” and “The Mad Doctor,” this one aims for a more lighthearted, slapstick tone that is unlikely to scare children easily. Hilarity comes in many forms over the short’s eight-minute runtime, from Mickey getting deluged by water that the ghosts surf and motorboat on to Goofy’s Marx Brothers-style mirror gag with one of the ghosts that leads to him getting stuck in a dresser and mistaking his own backside for a ghost, plus the simple fact that the trio brings shotguns and axes to deal with a buch of already dead people (life was clearly hard for the average ghost buster before the proton pack was invented). The way the trio finally solves the problem in the climax is also pretty hilarious, even if it doesn’t make that much sense if you think about it too hard.
The short also deserves some credit for its fluid animation (though this is classic Disney we’re talking about, so that’s not a surprise). The effects on the ghosts, such as the glowing, fading, and transparency, are exceptionally well-done for the time.
My only real complaint about the short is that the reverb effects on the ghosts’ voices are a little overdone, to the point that it’s often hard to make out what they’re saying, but that’s only a minor quibble. It may not have the usual aesthetic of the typical Halloween short (having been originally released on Christmas Eve), but it’s still a spooky good time for all ages.
#135: The Tell-Tale Heart
Animation style: Traditional 2D
Release date: December 17, 1953
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Production company: United Productions of America
Director: Ted Parmelee
Writers: Bill Scott and Fred Grable (based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe)
Producer: Stephen Bosustow
Music: Boris Kremenliev
One might hardly expect that UPA, the same company that gave us Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing, would be the studio to provide us with such a dead serious adaptation of one of the most popular horror short stories by one of the most well remembered horror authors of all time in 1953, of all years. But do it they did, and the world is all the better for it.
I’m sure we're all familiar with the story by now. The narrator (voiced here by James Mason) is living with an elderly man who is, by all accounts, kind to his flatmate. The narrator, however, cannot stand to look upon the old man’s blind, clouded “evil” eye, and so he murders the elder one night. He dismembers the corpse and hides it under the floorboards, and then sits over the corpse as he converses with police officers inquiring about a noise complaint. The narrator’s guilt quickly gets the better of him as he imagines that he can hear the old man’s heart still beating in its makeshift grave, and soon breaks down and confesses to the crime, ripping up the floorboards to reveal his grisly wrongdoing.
UPA uses its trademark limited animation techniques to a chilling effect in its take on the story. In fact, this might be the most limited the animation is in any of their shorts. You can probably count on one hand the number of things in the short that actually are animated (a moth, some creeping shadows, the police officers, the narrator’s hand slamming against his cell wall at the end as a jump scare, etc.). The lack of movement allows us to bask in the gothic dread of the background paintings, which are full of shadowy and angular shapes that lend an extra weight to the oppressively tense atmosphere.
What really propels this short into legendary status, though, is James Mason’s performance as the narrator, which gets more and more unhinged and desperate the longer the short goes on. He goes from sly and smug as he recounts the murder and tries to reassure the listener that he isn’t mad to frantic and skittish as his guilt over his crime boils over, leading to a perfect delivery of the classic final lines, “Here! Here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
The result was that the short was the first cartoon to receive an X rating from the British Board of Film Censors. While the passage of time has made that rating seem rather ridiculous in hindsight (hell, Watership Down was ten times more explicit, and that film got the equivalent of a G rating!), UPA’s Tell-Tale Heart remains a potent horror show even today. It has since earned the twenty-fourth spot on Jerry Beck’s 50 Greatest Cartoons list and was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2001.
But the real question is…is it a better adaptation than that one SpongeBob episode with the squeaky boots? Yes, probably, but both are still enjoyable Halloween watches.
Yes, I did it! I took the boots! They’re here! Under the floorboards! Oh, please, make it stop! It’s the squeakin’ of the hideous boots!
#254: Belladonna of Sadness
Animation style: Traditional 2D
Release date: June 27, 1973
Distributor: Nippon Herald Films
Production company: Mushi Production
Director: Eiichi Yamamoto
Writers: Yoshiyuki Fukuda, Eiichi Yamamoto (based on the book Satanism and Witchcraft by Jules Michelet)
Producers: Tadami Watanabe, Teruaki Yoshida, Makoto Motohashi, Keiko Koike
Music: Masahiko Satoh
Belladonna of Sadness, coming from the same studio that gave us Astro-Boy (of all things), is undoubtedly the most “arthouse” film I’ve covered in this series so far. It’s also probably the toughest watch out of any of them, especially for anyone who has gone through what happens to our main character in this tale of witchcraft, misogyny, and the oppressive power structures of the Middle Ages.
Jeanne (Aiko Nagayama), a young woman living in rural medieval France, appears to be on cloud nine, having recently married the love of her life, Jean (Katsutaka Ito). But the happiness quickly turns to horror when the local baron (Masaya Takahashi) demands a marriage tax that the couple is unable to pay, so he and his courtiers decide to take Jeanne’s virginity instead… violently. Her anger and shame in the aftermath make her a prime target for a rather phallic-shaped Satan (Tatsuya Nakadai), who gradually steers her toward witchcraft to help her find power and freedom in a time and place that lets women like her have neither. Sure enough, as Jeanne gains more and more power over the villagers, the baron grows more and more threatened, until he finally decides that something must be done about this upstart peasant girl…
If you’ve heard of this anime at all, then the first thing you probably know about it is its unique animation style. In a similar manner to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it features a hybrid of still images (usually shown as gorgeous watercolor paintings) and surprisingly fluid animated sequences, typically when something supernatural or sexual (or both) is occurring. This was probably more out of necessity than artistic vision, as Belladonna is a highly erotic film made by a studio that was in dire financial straits (indeed, Belladonna did so poorly that the box office that Mushi Productions declared bankruptcy and closed its doors for several years). Even so, it gives the film a unique identity that lets it stand above several other anime of the time.
The second thing you might know this film for is the way misogynistic social structures are explored through Jeanne’s story. Be forewarned: this film does not sugarcoat the horrors of being a woman in the age of the witch trials, or, as demonstrated in the beginning, the age of droit du seigneur. The nightmarishly symbolic image of Jeanne splitting vertically in half from the crotch upwards, while a swarm of blood-red bats fly out of the wound, might be one of the most appropriate metaphors for how rape feels to the victim that I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction. Of course, your mileage may vary on whether or not the graphically Freudian imagery shown throughout the rest of the work amounts to anything more than shock value, or whether the constant sexual violence Jeanne goes through undercuts the film’s feminist message.
As I’ve hopefully demonstrated, this film is definitely not for everyone. Not only does it deal with some very dark themes and story elements, but it’s also heavily dated to the 70s with its quirky jazz-rock soundtrack and general psychedelic art style. Still, one cannot deny that, across all of animation history, Belladonna of Sadness offers a unique experience that no other animation can match, for better or for worse.
#370: Prehistoric Beast
Animation style: Stop-motion
Release date: 1984
Production company: Tippett Studio
Director/writer/producer: Phil Tippett
Music: Mark Adler
About a decade before Jurassic Park showed the world how awesome and terrifying dinosaurs were, one of the great 20th-century masters of stop-motion animation created his own slice of dino-horror that made the point just as powerfully in about 1/12th the runtime.
We enter the primeval forests of Alberta, Canada, 65 million years ago, where a juvenile Monoclonius becomes so focused on grazing on a field of wildflowers that it doesn’t notice it has lost sight of its herd. That is, until a snapping twig alerts it to its surroundings, and to the fact that it’s all alone. Things go from bad to worse when it stumbles across a half-eaten Edmontosaurus carcass, and then finally meets the twig-snapper and the hadrosaur’s killer: Tyrannosaurus rex, who is still hungry and thinks the young centrosaurine would make a fine second course. The Monoclonius puts up a good fight, but it soon finds out the hard way why its assailant is known as the “tyrant lizard king.”
Phil Tippett had previously honed his skills bringing such remarkable creations as the AT-AT walkers from The Empire Strikes Back and the dragon from Dragonslayer to life through a unique stop-motion process known as “go-motion,” which adds motion blur effects to the models to create more realistic movements. This can be achieved either through “vaselensing” (smearing Vaseline on a plate of glass in front of the camera lens to blur the outlines of the model) or moving the model or the table it’s sitting on slightly while photographing another frame. Tippett decided to apply those techniques to a prehistoric narrative of his own creation, researching the latest paleontological findings to ensure his dinosaurs were as accurate as possible to the real animals.
The result, as some YouTube commenters have put it, is a bona fide dinosaur slasher film. It builds up the tension beautifully over the first half, beginning with a frightening shot of the T. rex with its gore-caked snout as it devours the hadrosaur carcass under a moonlit sky. Then we wait for the other shoe to drop as the frightened Monoclonius wanders deeper and deeper into the forest, with the tyrant lizard looming in the background as it stalks its new meal, until the killer finally reveals itself to its hapless victim. To top it all off, we never actually see what happens to the young ceratopsian after the Rex delivers the killing blow (symbolized by its lunging at the camera), just the others in its herd calling out for it, then the Rex calmly walking deeper into the forest to digest its meal.
The only things really wrong with the short are the several paleontological inaccuracies that anyone who isn’t a dino-nerd like myself wouldn’t pick up on. For instance:
-Most scientists now consider Monoclonius to be a dubious genus, with many considering the specimens assigned to the genus to be subadult Centrosaurus specimens instead.
-Tyrannosaurs never lived alongside any centrosaurine ceratopsians, only chasmosaurines like Triceratops and Torosaurus. Thus, it might be more accurate to refer to the tyrannosaur in this short as either an Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, or Daspletosaurus (my money would be on the latter, since it was more heavily built and thus probably better equipped to handle ceratopsian prey).
-The tyrannosaur going after the Monoclonius so soon after the hadrosaur kill makes no sense from an animal behavior standpoint, as the meat from the latter carcass likely should have sustained it for weeks. Maybe one could interpret the battle as a territorial dispute, except that would have probably taken the form of the Rex trying to intimidate the centrosaur rather than stalking it like a hungry lion.
Despite such quibbles, it’s hard to argue the short’s effectiveness in putting their modern-day audience in the shoes of the average Mesozoic-era herbivore, showing just how scary it was to live alongside predators that make even the most fearsome modern-day lions, tigers, and bears look like stuffed animals in comparison.
CBS certainly took notice and hired Tippett to create more prehistoric vignettes for the 1985 documentary film Dinosaur!, hosted by the late great Christopher Reeve. That special features several equally memorable go-motion animated sequences, including a Struthiomimus stealing a hadrosaur egg and then getting dismembered by a pair of Deinonychus, the T. rex going after a juvenile hadrosaur only to get knocked over by the father’s tail, a truncated version of Prehistoric Beast that remains just as tension-packed as the original, and a sequence showing the dinosaurs struggling to survive after the Chixulub asteroid impact. It’s woefully outdated in many aspects (especially in its (albeit skeptical) musings on dinosaurs possibly still being alive today in the form of Nessie and Mokele Mbembe). However, it’s still a fun watch even today.
We’ll check back in on Phil Tippett later in this article, but first, let’s look at another cult classic 80s anime film featuring horny demons…
#449: Demon City Shinjuku
Animation style: Traditional 2D
Release date: October 25, 1988
Distributors: Discotek Media, Sentai Filmworks
Production company: Madhouse
Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Writer: Kaori Okamura
Producers: Kenji Kurata, Makoto Seya
Music: Motokazu Shinoda
Of the triad of late 80s anime horror films that feature sexually aggressive demons, the others being Wicked City (which I covered in the first episode of this series) and Legend of the Overfiend, Demon City Shinjuku (brought to us by the same director as both Wicked City and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust) is definitely the least explicit out of all of them, which might make it the most accessible out of all of them.
In this demon-haunted universe, the Tokyo special ward of Shinjuku has become separated from the rest of the city by an event known as the Demon Quake that was triggered when the heroic Genichiro Izayoi (Banjo Ginja) fought his former friend Rebi Ra (Kiyoshi Kobayashi/Bob Sessions) after the latter sold his soul to Hell to gain the Devil’s evil powers, with a promise to serve the rest of the world to the demons in ten years. As the decade-long deadline approaches, Genichiro’s former teacher, Master Rai (Ichiro Nagai/George Little), tries to convince Izayoi’s son, Kyoya (Hideyuki Hori/Bradley Lavelle), to take up the fight, which the young man has no interest in.
But when the president of the world government, Kozumi Rama (Osamu Saka/Brian Note), is kidnapped by Rebi Ra and his daughter, Sayaka (Hiromi Tsuru/Teresa Gallagher), tells Kyoya that she’s going after her father with or without his help, he reluctantly follows her into the demon-haunted ruins. They find unlikely allies in the form of the resourceful child survivalist Chibi (Kyoko Tongu/Alex McSweeny) and the enigmatic sorcerer Mephisto (Yusaku Yara/Gareth Armstrong), but Kyoya still has only three days to master his magic skills enough to be able to stop Rebi Ra’s evil plan.
As I said before, this is by far the most accessible of the “horny demon” trilogy, as it features the least amount of sexual violence of the three. Sayaka gets attacked by a gang of rapists when she first enters the demon city (but is rescued by Kyoya before it goes too far), then Mephisto gets into a tussle with an aggressive female demon halfway through, and that’s pretty much it.
Unfortunately, the story is a little more rickety in this film. It’s chock full of fairytale cliches (the hot-blooded sword-wielding hero, a princess who defeats her enemies with the power of love, a wise master who mentors the hero, and a villain who was also said master’s pupil until he turned evil) that may turn off more cynical viewers. This isn’t helped by a climactic battle that ends rather anticlimactically. It almost reads as if the writer had watched Star Wars recently and didn’t double check the script to see if he was copying George Lucas’ homework a little too closely.
This isn’t helped by an English dub that’s rather hit and miss, especially compared to Wicked City. Kyoya and Sayaka sound fine (fun fact: Teresa Gallagher would later go on to voice Nicole Watterson in Cartoon Network’s The Amazing World of Gumball), but the rest of the English cast is plagued with various accents that sound rather out of place in a story set in Japan. Almost every female character that isn’t Sayaka or the female demon speaks with a Southern accent, while Mephisto speaks with a weird accent that sounds like it’s stuck halfway between Paris and Transylvania. The worst offender, though, is Chibi. Not only does his Mexican accent sound more like a lame impression of the Great Cornholio than any actual Hispanic person, but if my research is correct, he was supposed to be a child in the orginal Japanese. Clearly, the voice director for the English cast did not do their homework.
Despite that and the somewhat unoriginal story, Demon City Shinjuku still manages to have an identity of its own with its slower pace and post-apocalyptic aesthetic once it reaches the ruins of Shinjuku. It also includes several inventive action sequences as well, including one in which a demon that can produce doppelgangers of itself sucks Kyoya into a puddle and forces him to try to figure out which demon is the real one before he drowns, and one in which Sayaka has to figure out how to rescue Kyoya from a lotus-eater trap generated by the angry souls of the children who died in the Demon Quake.
Indeed, this film was one of several featured on the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Saturday Anime” block in the early 90s which (alongside Akira, Vampire Hunter D, and many others) opened many a Western viewers eyes to the possiblities of animation outside of the kid-friendly Disney status quo. Demon City Shinjuku, for all its faults, is still probably the best gateway for those who want something more edgy than Disney but not as extreme as Urotsokidoji or Violence Jack.
#585: Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn
Animation style: Traditional 2D
Release dates: May 16, 1997-May 28, 1999
Distributor: HBO
Production companies: HBO Animation, Todd McFarlane Entertainment
Creator: Todd McFarlane
Producers: Todd McFarlane (executive); Catherine Winder, John Kafka
Writers: Alan B. McElroy, Gary Hardwick, Larry Brody, John Shirley, John Leekley, Rebekah Bradford, Victor Bumbalo, Gerard Brown
Music: Shirley Walker, J. Peter Robinson
1997 saw two adaptations of the story of arguably the most popular character to emerge from the gritty ‘90s era of antiheroic superhero comics. The film adaptation, starring Michael Jai White as the titular character, has since been widely regarded as one of the worst superhero movies of all time. Unfortunately, it may have accidentally dragged the animated TV series, starring Keith David as the hellspawn mercenary, down with it, which is a shame, because Todd McFarlane’s Spawn is probably one of the most groundbreaking animated TV series to come out of the Western scene in that it told a dark, serious story in a time where that was almost unheard of outside of Japan.
In this version of the story, Al Simmons (David), a former black ops government assassin, goes to Hell after being burned alive by his teammate Jess Chapel (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) on the orders of their boss, Jason Wynn (John Rafter Lee). Once in Hell, Simmons makes a deal with the demon king Malebolgia to become a soldier in Hell’s army in exchange for the ability to return to Earth and see his wife, Wanda (Dominique Jennings), again. In true deal-with-the-devil fashion, however, Simmons returns five years later as a fearsome creature resembling a rotting corpse shrouded in a blood-red cape, and discovers that Wanda has married his best friend, Terry Fitzgerald (Victor Love), and started a family with him. With nowhere to go and nothing to live for, Simmons retreats to the dark alleys of the inner city, where he develops a love/hate relationship with the local homeless population and spends his time murdering criminals and crooked cops and sending their souls to Hell. All the while, he is torn between two figures on opposite sides of the war between Heaven and Hell: a demonic emissary called the Violator (James Hanes), who spends most of his time pushing Al towards fulfilling Hell’s plans for him in the form of a short, fat, manic clown (Michael Nicolosi); and Cogliostro (Richard Dysart), who tries to convince Al not to give in to his demonic urges and reembrace his humanity. But what exactly is Al’s true role in the coming celestial battle, and which side will he ultimately choose?
Spawn’s animated series was part of a block of animation on the HBO channel that was so short-lived that it only had one other TV show for company: Ralph Bakshi’s Spicy City, which was canceled after only six episodes when Bakshi refused to let the network replace his hand-selected writing team with Hollywood professionals. Spawn, on the other hand, lasted for eighteen episodes and, in contrast to Spicy City’s mixed to negative critical reception, was widely praised for its animation, gothic atmosphere, compelling character drama, and voice acting.
As far as the animation goes, I don’t think there’s any American animated series before or since that looks quite like it. Not even Batman: The Animated Series had this many shadows covering the characters’ faces or portrayals of urban decay quite this grimy and depressing. Being a show made for adults, Spawn could also tackle subject matter that BTAS could never get away with, like serial killers, the shady world of covert assassins, and even religious themes. The sympathetic portrayal of the homeless people who live alongside Al in the dark alleys feels especially pogniant in the 2020s where America is still dealing with a significant homelessness crisis despite the fact that we have more empty houses than we have homeless people (16 million vs. just over 770,000 as of this year).
The excellent voice cast helps sell the gothic drama of the story quite well. Many fans of the character still consider Keith David to be the definitive voice of Spawn thanks to his intense and moody performance, while Michael Nicolosi’s performance as the Violator is just soft spoken enough to differentiate him from Mark Hamill’s Joker while still remaining just as kooky and unhinged. Richard Dysart gives an appropriately sly performance as the enigmatic Cogliostro, while Dominique Jennings and Victor Love effortlessly sell Wanda and Terry’s fear as they seperately uncover Jason Wynn’s web of corruption and cause him to put their family in the crosshairs. Speaking of whom, John Rafter Lee’s Wynn plays out like a much more unscrupulous version of David Xanatos from Disney’s Gargoyles, so much so that I was even fully convinced it was Jonanthan Frakes voicing him until I looked up the voice cast. I should also shout out James Burke and Michael McShane as detectives Sam Burke and Maximillian “Twitch” Williams, who have to deal with the widespread corruption surrounding them in their police precinct while also dealing with the killings in the alley where Spawn lives (they don’t interact with him enough to become Jim Gordon analogues, though).
The show isn’t without it’s problems, though. Some characters and story elements introduced early in Season One are abruptly dropped with no explanation. Some are forgivable, like the angel bounty hunter Angela (Denise Poirier) having to be replaced by original character Lisa Wu/Jade (Ming-Na Wen) due to a copyright dispute between her co-creators McFarlane and Neil Gaiman. Others, like Chapel going from breaking down in tears over his guilt from killing Al in his debut episode to outright bragging about it while confronting him, are much more confusing. Also, every episode of the series begins with a live action segment where Tom McFarlane goes on philosphical musings related to the subject of each episode, which tend to come off as more pretentious than profound, especially with McFarlane’s obvious lack of acting talent.
Still, it’s hard not to appreciate an adult animated TV show that came from an era where telling a dark, serious story through was very uncommon in the West. Sure, it has plenty of comic book cheesiness going on, but the voice acting is superb, the animation gothic and moody, and the action scenes as thrilling as any superhero setpieces should be. American adult TV animation has tended to be used more for comedy than drama (especially in the 2000s and 2010s), so it’s quite an experience seeing a show like Spawn that’s older than South Park (albeit by a few months, but still…).
#629: Courage the Cowardly Dog
Animation style: Mixed media, but primarily traditional 2D
Release date: November 12, 1999-November 22, 2002
Distributor: Cartoon Network
Production companies: Stretch Films, Cartoon Network Studios, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons (pilot only)
Creator: John R. Dilworth
Producers: John R. Dilworth (executive); Robert Winthrop, Winnie Chaffee
Writers: John R. Dilworth, Irvin S. Bauer, David Steven Cohen, Bill Marsilli, Craig Shemin, Katy McLaughlin, Jeff Kunkin, Bruce Wilpon, Susan Kim, Billy Aronsen, Lori Lazarus, Mike Samonek, John Reynolds, Allan Neuwirth, Gary Cooper, Michelle Belly Dilworth, Michael Sporn
Music: Jody Gray, Andy Ezrin
We interrupt this blog post to bring you…Courage the Cowardly Dog’s show, starring Courage, the Cowardly Dog (Marty Grabstein)! Abandoned as a pup, he was found by Muriel (Thea White), who lives in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, with her husband, Eustace Bagge (Lionel G. Wilson/Arthur Anderson). But creepy stuff happens in Nowhere. It’s up to Courage to save his new home!
This creepy Cartoon Network classic originated as the 1996 short film “The Chicken from Outer Space,” which was nominated for the Best Animated Short Film at the 68th Academy Awards (it lost to the Wallace and Gromit short “A Close Shave”). Cartoon Network became intrigued by the premise after the short was featured as part of their What a Cartoon! block (which also helped give birth to Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, and many more), and greenlit the show as a full series that would run for four seasons, each consisting of 13 episodes.
Most episodes of the series operate on a formulaic plot: the Bagge household is menaced by some kind of threat (usually supernatural in nature) that Courage tries to warn them about. Unfortunately, Muriel is often blissfully oblivious to the danger she’s in, and Eustace, who can’t stand the sight of Courage, is too stubborn and grouchy to listen. As a result, Courage has to overcome his anxious and easily frightened nature to rescue his owners from whatever monster is terrorizing them that week, usually on his own but sometimes with help from allies like his sarcastic, sentient computer (Simon Prebble); the incompetent and absent-minded Dr. Vindaloo (Paul Schoeffler); and the fortune-telling Romani chihuahua Shirley the Medium (Mary Testa).
The result of this formula is a cartoon that is well-loved by animation buffs for its surreal and dark sense of humor and atmosphere, as well as its skillful use of medium blending. While the show is mainly animated in 2D, several characters and scenes are animated with stop-motion (like the infamous violin girl jump-scare in “Courage in the Big Stinkin’ City”) and 3D (like King Ramses and the weird bugle/fetus thing in “Perfect”), which are used to significant effect in scaring the crap out of its viewers.
It’s been said that a story is only as good as its villains, and Courage the Cowardly Dog has them in spades, from the feline serial killer Katz (also Schoeffler) to the French master thief duck Le Quack (also also Schoeffler) to the murderous undead film director Benton Tarantella (Peter Fernandez) and the rude Chinese mad scientist Di Lung (Tim Chi Ly). Special mention should go to Freaky Fred (also also also Schoffler), Muriel’s barber nephew, who has an unhealthy obsession with shaving his victims completely bald (there’s a metaphor in there. A very, very dark metaphor.)
For all the vicious killers that Courage encounters, however, there are just as many that are simply misunderstood and only need help, like the Duck Brothers (Will Ryan impersonating Ringo Starr), the Snowman (also also also also Schoffler impersonating Sean Connery), Robot Randy (Todd Stashwick impersonating Christopher Walken), Dr. Zalost (also also also also also Schoffler), and the Hunchback of Nowhere (Allen Swift). Indeed, another thing the series is remembered for is the episodes that aren’t afraid to tug on the heartstrings, like “Last of the Starmakers,” “The Quilt Club,” “The Mask,” and “Remembrance of Courage Past.” “The Mask” deserves special mention for its tackling of the subjects of domestic abuse in the form of Mad Dog (also Fernandez), who separates Kitty and Bunny (Barbara McCulloh and Lori Ann Mahl) because he’s jealous of their relationship. When the former moves in with the Bagges and starts abusing Courage because of the burning hatred for dogs that Mad Dog’s abuse instilled in her, Courage sets out to reunite the couple and end his torment.
All this makes for a hell of a rollercoaster ride, and makes Courage the Cowardly Dog one of the most beloved Cartoon Network shows of all time. Indeed, it remains popular enough that it even got a crossover movie in 2021 called Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo Meets Courage the Cowardly Dog. The film was somewhat controversial upon release, as John R. Dilworth confirmed that he had no involvement with the production. Still, I think it’s worth watching for Thea White’s last performance as Muriel, who sadly passed away at the age of 81 three months before the film’s release.
#792: Coraline
Animation style: Stop-motion
Release date: February 5, 2009
Distributors: Focus Features, Universal Pictures
Production companies: Laika, Pandemonium Films
Director/writer: Henry Selick (based on the novel by Neil Gaiman)
Producers: Henry Selick, Bill Mechanic, Claire Jennings, Mary Sandell
Music: Bruno Coulais
(Disclaimer: My review of this film comes in the wake of disturbing allegations of sexual assault against the original book’s author, Neil Gaiman, as well as rumors of abusive working conditions at Laika. While I still intend to give this film a positive review regardless, I feel I should strongly suggest that anyone who reads this consider watching the movie in a way that does not financially support the studio or Gaiman (borrow it from a library, or instance, or maybe consider hoisting the sails, if you catch my meaning), at least until Laika is allowed to unionize.)
One of the most beloved and unique animated films to emerge in the 21st century so far, Coraline not only helped put the Portland-based studio Laika on the map but also helped revive theatrical stop-motion in an era when CG mainly dominated mainstream animation.
We follow Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), an 11-year-old former resident of Pontiac, Michigan, as she finds her new home in Ashland, Oregon, to be dull and dreary. Her parents, Charlie and Mel (voiced by John Hodgeman and Teri Hatcher), are too busy with work to relieve her boredom, and she wants little to do with her eccentric neighbors at the apartment complex. They include Sergei Alexander Bobinsky (Ian McShane), a Russian gymnast who runs a mouse circus, retired burlesque actresses April Spink and Miriam Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), and the landlady’s nervous and geeky grandson Wybourne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.), whom she hates the most.
As a result, when she finds a small door in her living room wall that leads to a parallel universe that mirrors hers, featuring idealized, button-eyed doppelgangers of her parents, scrumptious meals, and a garden decorated to look like her face, she’s overjoyed. She ignores cryptic warnings about her “Other Mother” from her neighbors and a talking black cat (Keith David) until the Other Mother reveals her one condition for letting Coraline stay with her: the girl must sew buttons into her eyes. Coraline Jones soon realizes that the Other Mother is not taking no for an answer, and she’ll have to use all her wits and cunning if she wants to return to her real parents.
Like a lot of the most popular films in any genre, it’s hard to pick a place to start when talking about how much of an artistic triumph Coraline is. It was the film that introduced Laika’s stop-motion methods to the world, an animation style so oil-smooth that one might even mistake it for computer animation if they’re not paying attention. The film’s distinct visual style (courtesy of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi) also adds to its unique identity, featuring muted colors in the real world and more vibrant colors in the Other World, at least until the Other Mother’s plans start unraveling. Bruno Coulais’ score is also innovative and unique, featuring children’s choirs singing gibberish to add an extra creep factor.
The voice cast is very well-chosen. Dakota Fanning definitely shines as the spunky and headstrong Coraline, but it’s Teri Hatcher’s performance as the Other Mother that really steals the show. Hatcher had no experience in voice acting before this film, yet she totally kills it as the child-murdering Beldam, especially as she grows more and more hysterical as Coraline gains the upper hand during their final confrontation.
The film isn’t totally perfect: Coraline herself can act rather unnecessarily bratty and cruel at times, especially toward Wybie, but that’s a minor problem that gets solved with a good dose of character development. In any case, no film Laika has made since has gained anywhere near the notoriety or financial success of Coraline. It’s a perfect movie to share with older kids during the Halloween season.
Of course, I’d personally enjoy it more if the original book author weren’t a sex pest or if Travis Knight weren’t a corporate nepo-baby who doesn’t believe in workers’ rights, but until Laika unionizes, what can we do?
#896: Over the Garden Wall
Animation style: Traditional 2D
Release date: November 3-7, 2014
Distributor: Cartoon Network
Production company: Cartoon Network Studios
Creator: Patrick McHale
Producers: Patrick McHale, Rob Sorcher, Brian A. Miller, Curtis Lelash, Jennifer Pelphery (executive); Pernelle Hayes
Writers: Patrick McHale, Steve Wolfhard, Natasha Allegri, Zac Gorman, Bert Youn, Aaron Renier, Jim Campbell, Laura Park, Pendleton Ward, Steve MacLeod, Nick Edwards, Tom Herpich, Mark Bodnar, Cole Sanchez, Vi Nguyen
Music: The Blasting Company
This modern-day tribute to the early days of animation follows half-brothers Wirt and Greg (voiced by Elijah Wood and Collin Dean), who have become lost in a strange, mysterious land called “the Unknown,” which seems to be populated by characters from different periods of pre-1950s Americana. Among the characters they meet are their main companion, Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey), a snarky and irritable bluebird who acts as their reluctant guide through the forests; a reclusive and antisocial woodsman (Christopher Lloyd) who warns the boys about the dangers lurking in the Unknown; a village of pumpkin people led by the giant Enoch (Chris Isaak); and Greg’s pet frog (Jack Jones) whom he can’t seem to pick a name for. Along the way, they encounter many seemingly villainous characters who turn out to be misunderstood. But there is one denizen of the Unknown who really is as evil as his reputation claims he is: the Beast (Samuel Ramey), who seems to have taken a special interest in the boys…
Over the Garden Wall has come to be not just a Halloween classic but something to be enjoyed throughout the entire fall season, and it’s not hard to see why. The whole look of the show owes a lot to the real-life beauty of New England’s forests as the leaves begin to turn, something often highlighted by how the intros of several episodes focus on lovingly animated autumn foliage.
As mentioned above, the series is also influenced by pre-1950s Americana, with each location the boys encounter in each episode representing a different period in American history. For instance, the tavern they visit in episode 4 is straight out of the Revolutionary War era, while the pumpkin people’s village of Pottsfield is reminiscent of the Puritan age (although the main aesthetic seems to be inspired by the 1800s, especially the schoolhouse from episode 3 and the paddleboat ferry from episode 6). References to pre-1950s American animation also abound, most notably in the Highwayman’s song in episode 4, where the singer is animated similarly to a rotoscoped Cab Calloway in 1932’s Minnie the Moocher, and episode 8, in which Greg is transported to an angelic cloud city heavily inspired by cartoons of the 20s and 30s.
But none of that would matter if there weren’t a good story and voice cast to hold the audience’s interest, and fortunately, this cartoon has it in spades. Wood and Dean have excellent chemistry as the responsible (if somewhat uptight) older sibling, Wirt, and the goofy younger sibling, Greg. Lynesky’s Beatrice manages to combine just the right amount of attitude and heart, while Lloyd adds the right amount of hysterics to his performance as the nervous woodsman. At the same time, Ramey puts his deep, operatic baritone to good use in giving the shadowy Beast a hefty dose of menace.
The story is full of twists and turns, as any good mystery story should be. How did Wirt and Greg end up in the Unknown to begin with? Can this mysterious Adelaide that Beatrice keeps telling the boys about really bring them home? And why is the Beast so interested in Wirt and Greg? The answers to these questions will shock and surprise you, and the payoff to all of the buildup is very well worth it once you get to the last two episodes.
In summary, Over the Garden Wall almost plays out like a Tim Burton/David Lynch fever dream set in a Mark Twain novel. It is easily one of the most extraordinary things to ever come out of Cartoon Network, and it is very much a must-watch for anyone who loves the fall season (and there are a lot of you; 45% of Americans have named it their favorite season).
#975: Mad God
Animation style: Stop-motion with some live action elements
Release date: August 5, 2021
Distriubtors: Shudder, IFC Midnight
Production company: Tippett Studio
Director/writer/producer: Phil Tippett
Music: Dan Wool
After his forays into prehistory in the mid-80s, Phil Tippett continued to create iconic cinematic creatures using go-motion, such as the ED-209s in Robocop, the two-headed dragon in Willow, and the Dark Overlord creatures in Howard the Duck. During this period, he began work on a massive personal project involving a gigantic hellish underworld full of monstrous creatures and nebulous terrors. Little did he know, however, that Mad God would only come into its own after a decades-long development hell process that would rival The Thief and the Cobbler in sheer length.
The story (as much as the film can be said to have one) follows a figure clad in a gas mask and a black longcoat known only as the Assassin, who descends via a diving bell into a post-apocalyptic underground hellscape inhabited by tortured mutant creatures who are constantly falling prey to much meaner and scarier mutants. He appears to have been sent by the Last Man (Alex Cox) from the surface world to try to blow up the underworld with a suitcase bomb. He gets captured by a group of sadistic doctors, though, and soon he (and the audience) are shown the true extent of the cruelty endemic to the inhabitants of this subterranean realm.
Tippett initially started production on the film in 1987. However, after Steven Spielberg decided to ditch go-motion dinosaurs in favor of CGI models for 1993’s Jurassic Park (a story I covered in my review of the film here), Tippett decided that stop-motion no longer had a place in the film industry. Thus, Mad God went dormant for around 20 years, while Tippett primarily worked in CG from that point onward on films such as Starship Troopers, Evolution, and The Twilight Saga.
In the early 2010s, however, members of his studio convinced Tippett to resurrect the project. Three segments from the film would be uploaded to the Internet as short films throughout the 2010s as it inched nearer and nearer to its long-awaited completion. Production wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, though; Tippett’s frustrations over the project built up until he finally had to check himself into a psychiatric ward in 2020 after suffering a mental breakdown. His mood wasn’t improved once the completed film was rejected by two film festivals. Luckily, the 74th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland took a chance on the film, premiering it in August 2021. The horror-themed streaming service Shudder gave it a wide release the following year.
A fair warning to any who might wish to check it out, though: It’s probably a challenging ride even for anyone with a strong stomach. There’s hardly a moment in this film’s 83-minute runtime that doesn’t involve incredibly nauseating and nightmarish images. Let me describe just one sequence, just to give you a sense of what I’m talking about.
At one point early on, the Assassin stumbles across a row of giants strapped to electric chairs, which causes them to void their bowels constantly. The ensuing excrement is then transported to a lower level, where it is fashioned into an army of golem-like creatures known as “shit-men,” who are forced to work on seemingly pointless tasks while constantly getting maimed and killed in horrifically creative ways. All the while, they are supervised by creatures known as “butt sergeants” (which look like bipedal masses of tumors and testicles with diarrhea constantly shooting out of their anuses) and a boss who appears as a decomposing mouth and pair of eyes broadcast on a tower covered in television screens that speaks in a language resembling a babbling infant.
Such extreme imagery isn’t helped by the fact that the film doesn’t follow a traditional story structure (since Tippett favored just letting his ideas for the project take him wherever they would and feared that following a conventional narrative would force him to sacrifice them) or the fact that it is told entirely without dialogue, thus leaving viewers to come up with their own theories as to what is going on. We do get hints, like with the Tower of Babel sequence that starts the film, and the passage from Leviticus that follows (“If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over. You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars, and pile your dead bodies on the lifeless forms of your idols, and I will abhor you”). Even so, no explanation for all the pain of suffering in this realm is forthcoming.
Overall, Mad God is probably best approached as an artistic experience rather than a conventional film. It’s tough for me to put my feelings about this film into words. For all of the grotesquerie it put me through, I’m definitely happy I saw it, and I have nothing but kind words for the animation team. Whatever one thinks of it, I think we can all agree that, for better or for worse, it is a one-of-a-kind artistic experience like no other.
And that’s all the animated horror I have for you this October. I have plenty more spooky selections from my list that I would love to talk about with you, but sadly, that will have to wait until next October. I know, I’m just as frustrated about that as you, but them’s the brakes. I do have a “1001 Animations” Christmas special planned for December, so stay tuned for that.
Meanwhile, the next proper article will probably be the “Cryptids of North America” entry on West Virginia. First, however, I need to share some additional new developments in my personal life that may impact my upload schedule in the near future. So stay tuned for a new update post, if not tomorrow, then in the next few days.
In the meantime, though, have yourselves a very happy and safe Halloween!
