Extraordinary Tales

Adapter/director Raul Garcia chose different graphic styles to animate five Edgar Allan Poe stories in the short but vibrant pastiche "Extraordinary Tales."

Some think animation is just for kids, Garcia says in "The Making of" Blu-ray feature, "but it's a technique, not a genre." He added that this project is "to put it a little beyond what we consider animation is about."

Garcia took the tales of Poe, the "father of the black novel," and illustrated them with styles to respect the spirit of the story.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" has a German Expressionism palette, on a huge, Gothic setting with cross-hatching used for the shadows. Garcia also associated various instruments from the score with each character: failing twin brother Roderick is a mournful cello, and the narrator (perfect Sir Christopher Lee) is a violin.

Comics artists and writer Alberto Breccia's flat, black-and-white style inspired "The Tell-Tale Heart," narrated by an old scratchy recording by Bela Lugosi (who died in 1956). The animation is appropriately startling, from the weight of the old man's body being dragged and dismembered, to the three bald, bespectacled policemen looking like identical "Matrix" Agent Smiths or the Strangers from "Dark City."

A 1950s pulp comic book ethos, bad printing and rich color, dominates "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which the creative team admits was the hardest to achieve technically. Narrated by Julian Sands but sporting the thin-mustached face of Vincent Price, the mesmerist attempts to keep the dying from death to a score of Theremin-infused music.

Horror auteur Guillermo del Toro narrates the more realistic "The Pit and the Pendulum," following the French army in Toledo as they imprison and interrogate a hallucinating man.

Filmmaker Roger Corman voices the Prince in the watercolor world of "The Masque of the Red Death," as palatial debauchery ends with Poe's infamous body count.

The quintet is framed by 3D paper animated segments of Death (voiced by Cornelia Funke) conversing with a raven representing Poe (voiced by Stephen Hughes).

She says, "You devoted many pages to my name, caressing my face with your many poems, kissing my lips with your prose."

She adds that Poe's works, like this film (which would be great to show to students, to "push young people to discover his timeless writings"), are "all veiled letters addressed to me."

"Extraordinary Tales"
Blu-ray/DVD set
$29.95
https://vimeo.com/111102556