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↓ 29th October, 2007 @ 11:42am

Mark Twain And An Angel Named Satan

Released in 1985, The Adventures of Mark Twain is the creation of Will Vinton, best known for The California Raisins. The movie is a series of vignettes based on Twain’s stories and his life. The overarching plot of the film is that Twain, disgusted with people and society, boards a riverboat-airship in order to collide with Haley’s Comet and end his own life. He is joined on his terminal adventure by Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher, who are attempting to convince Twain that life is worth living.

This particular vignette is based on Twain’s short story The Mysterious Stranger, which he rewrote several times as The Chronicles of Young Satan, Schoolhouse Hill, and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and which remained unpublished until after his death. Schoolhouse Hill is the only one that features Tom and Huck but all prominently feature the character of Satan, or No. 44.

Satan does our three diminutive counselors no favors, as it pontificates on the greed and pettiness of man’s existence while putting on a lilliputian play on its floating island in the middle of an expansive sea of nothing. The mood is appropriately dark and malevolent -despite Satan’s assurance that it can “do no wrong, for I do not know what it is”- and the pacing of Satan’s simmering disgust is perfect. The final frames of its monologue, as its mask becomes a glint in Twain’s eye, are quite haunting. Some truly superb claymation.

very creepy, disturbing children’s cartoon, banned from TV [Youtube]