Extraordinary Tales Reviews

This feels like a coherent animated horror anthology than a collage of Raúl García’s various influences and cinematic obsessions writ large. The inherent “cool factor” involved in watching short films of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories narrated by the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi goes a long way towards justifying the very existence of Extraordinary Tales, but I just wish there was more there.

Parts of García’s various short films are spectacular, beautiful, and baroque works of animation. The film is never less than visually pleasing even if the narrative stumbles or the presentation needed more finessing. The biggest ding against the film is a wraparound segment involving Poe reincarnated as a raven (oy) having a discussion with the specter of death, ingeniously voiced by author Cornelia Funke. These segments merely exist to allow the audience to breathe in-between gothic set pieces acting out the likes of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Pit and the Pendulum, yet they fail to establish the next segment in any meaningful way. These sequences left me perplexed and they felt too on the nose throughout.

Extraordinary Tales is much better when acting out its various shorts, each animated in a unique and individual manner. The Fall of the House of Usher’s characters resemble marionettes and the whole thing is wrapped up in angular designs and moody shadows. The Tell-Tale Heart is all negative space as blindingly bright whites and contrasted by inky blacks swallowing up the frame and forming shapes along the way. The Masque of Red Death is all watercolors and exaggerated designs where everyone looks roughly nine feet tall, all long limbs, disproportionate bodies, and jagged edges.  

Everything looks gorgeous, especially a The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar that functions like a motion comic for the EC Comics days with a Vincent Price proxy in the lead, but the truncated versions of these stories grow increasingly frustrating. You just start to get into the groove of the films and they’re wrapping up and spitting us back to the raven and death engaging in word play and seduction. It doesn’t help that some of the narration sounds buried under the mix and is hard to hear, Lugosi’s vintage text is pummeled with artifacts that make some of his overacting nearly incomprehensible.

But if Extraordinary Tales manages to make someone pickup the works of Poe, the Hammer Horror films of Lee, the Universal Monsters days of Lugosi, or the nasal purring theatrics of Price, then it all evens up to a net positive. As it stands, Extraordinary Tales feels like a film tailor made for future use in high school English class as a supplementary material for lessons on gothic literature. To quote Brian Tallerico: “It just never quite rises above that faint praise.”