L’univers imaginaire de H. P. Lovecraft au prisme du cinéma d’animation

Abstract

This article focuses on a number of animated films, highlighting various modes of adaptation, rewriting or recycling. In these variations on Lovecraftian motifs, genre hybridity is quite frequent, combining fantasy, horror and film noir as in History of the Necronomicon (Hideke Takayama, 1987). Intertextual references abound as well as parodic modulations. Animation techniques are varied: clay puppets, plasticine, pencils, pastel and digital animation. The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories (Ryo Shinagawa, 2008) exploits a new device, “ga-nime”, a mode of slow 3-D animation with mixed materials and static shots. In The Night Ocean (Maria Lorenzo Hernandez, 2015), H.P. Lovecraft’s and Robert Barlow’s subjective and possibly unreliable first person narrative is rendered as a travelogue of a melancholy painter whose whose drawings and paintings are animated with a very wide range of visual devices and sound effects, with a haunting musical score. Both films convincingly demonstrate that animated cinema may succeed in translating into images and sounds an imaginary world that often resists screen transposition.