We didn’t do Disney in my family when I was a kid, but as an adult I marveled at the work of that studio’s masters, particularly Ub Iwerks’ early Silly Symphonies. cartoons directed by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Clampett, McKimson, and others. Of course I grew up heavily influenced by the great Warner Bros. I felt that we would be following in the footstep’s of UPA’s classic adaptation of Poe’s “A Tell Tale Heart.” I’d seen it in high school, back when we used to lug 16mm projectors to classrooms, and I’d been very impressed. Greg was also inspired by Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, for her passion and accuracy more German expressionism Van Gogh, for the environments, “twisting perspectives from an unstable mind,” as Greg says as well as Frank Brangwyn and Edward Gorey. I gave Greg reference images from Murnau, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Doré, and others. As he started, I asked Greg to be uninhibited-we weren’t making a photo-real film after all. Greg Knight was crazy enough to immediately share my vision. We both were commuting to Lucasfilm in San Francisco. It turned out the artist I sought was taking the bus with me to work everyday. The trick would be to find an exceptional artist who would be interested. I’d call it Riddle of the Black Cat.īack in the Bay Area, I felt that the artwork could be done with a number of key frame drawings-perhaps 50-enough to convey the mood and action without getting into cost prohibitive digital animation. It was fun to visit, nearly everyday, the fantastic pyramids in the jungle and then, back at our rental, to write and draw. On vacation in the Yucatan, I adapted Poe’s story into a rough script and storyboarded out the shots in crude thumbnail sketches. Years later, having transitioned from painting to writing, it occurred to me that this game might be illustrated as an animated short. In doing so, I realized that there was an intriguing game being played within the tale. While painting and teaching in Paris, I lectured on “The Black Cat” and decided to really take the story apart word by word. As an adult, I read many of his short stories several times. For my Bar Mitzvah I was given a two-volume complete works of Poe, and read them cover to cover, enthralled by his command of horror and storytelling, his inventiveness.

Poe the cat