Animation puts the audience in a world that live action cannot. Or if it does, it gives the audience a different feeling than live action will. According to Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye, emotion is one of the, if not the most important part of story telling, particularly in the story, The Tell Tale Heart. The Tell Tale Heart animation is very old, and therefore uses different techniques than we do today, and the animators had fewer resources and tools to use. However, for the most part, this animation is successful.
The Tell Tale Heart uses motion in very few characters/elements in the animation. The thing that does the most moving is the camera. Many of the shots/scenes were just a picture or series of still images that were then panned through with a camera or representative of a camera; this is often called the “Ken Burns effect”, in modern day. This technique is acceptable, especially for it’s time period (1950s), but since the images are still images, for some shots, it is difficult to tell what things are in the image. This is because, they do not move, so it is hard to tell what shapes represent what. Another reason is because this story is very ominous and therefore is very darkly lit and has many shadows, adding mystery. However, this mystery is not always good, because I found it difficult to tell what some things were with such quick shots, zooms and pans. Another reason why this does not work is because there is audio that is meant to match up with what should be happening in the scene. We see a still image of a person walking, and we hear footsteps. Alright, I know he is walking, but it looses its realism, feeling and I am no longer in to it, and by “in to it” I mean, I am no longer emotionally attached to this story, which loses its affect. The walking example is one that is not too bad for the viewer. Contrary, another instance would be if there is a still image of someone walking, but I cannot tell if the person is walking or not because of the shapes, shadows, darkness, zooms, pans, etc. At this point, the footstep sound effects seem random to the viewer and then the shot changes before we can think about what really happened. With this problem, the animators seemed to have animated the background quite successfully.
The background in The Tell Tale Heart animation is intricate. Some scenes are extremely well done and very realistic as other backgrounds are lacking. Either way, the key goal here is to make the audience feel something, to feel that this “sane” man, really is insane and that perhaps, we really are too. In this particular story, the background plays a large role, that and a few small objects such as the eye, heart, and other things that look like the eye. Other than that, facial expressions are not used much in this animation, and therefore, the background takes over giving that emotional feeling that we do not gain from something that shows great emotion such as a human’s face. In Murch’s book, In the Blink of an Eye, emotion is the number one reason to make a cut, but the third most important reason to make a cut is for “rhythm.” The quick shots, and still images make this animation very jumpy and give it terrible rhythm. However, The Tell Tale Heart is a bit of a nightmare like story; the emotion you get watching this film or hearing the story, is similar to a nightmare if the story is told well. In dreams, images and thoughts are very jumpy and fragmented, according to Murch. “Film is like thought. It’s the closest to thought process of any form of thought,” says John Huston, in In the Blink of an Eye. Therefore, this negative aspect of this animation, can actually be seen as a positive aspect. Perhaps, it was created with this fragmentation in order to make that nightmare-like connection to the human thought and get the audience to experience The Tell Tale Heart senselessly, like in a dream, and be vulnerable to become afraid and feel that this eye and heart are extremely irking.
This rhythm brings us back to the emotion that we feel. Bottom line is, the emotion I felt is that this narrator is insane. He thinks he is sane, but, he is definitely not. Which then raises the question, “I’m sane, right? Maybe not.” With that said, I believe that this animation is successful. It may not be traditional, it may not be the easiest movie to watch, but it gets it’s thoughts and emotions across to the audience successfully, and that is all that matters, once the audience is already in their seats, viewing the movie.
Works Cited
Murch, Walter. “In the Blink of an Eye.” Silman James Press. Beverly Hills, CA. 1995.
