The Bewilderingly Bleak 1985 Claymation Movie The Adventures of Mark Twain is Nightmare Fuel in the Best Way
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1985’s The Adventures of Mark Twain combines two of my great loves: stop-motion animation courtesy of the geniuses at Will Vinton Studios and children’s entertainment from the 1980s that is unfathomably dark and inappropriate for small children.
In this column, I’ve covered Reagan-era traumatizers like Follow That Bird, The Peanut Butter Solution, The Last Unicorn, Labyrinth, The Secret of Nimh, Dark Crystal, and Return to Oz.
The Adventures of Mark Twain fits neatly into this curious paradigm. It’s less concerned with the life of the legendary American wit than his impending death.
The Claymation marvel’s morbid framing device is inspired by Twain’s 1909 wisecrack, “I came in with Halley's Comet. It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, 'Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together. ‘"
Sure enough, Twain’s epic American life ended shortly after Halley’s Comet returned in 1910.
Twain succeeded in dying alongside the comet that marked his birth roughly three-quarters of a century earlier through happenstance and dumb luck.
The fictionalized Mark Twain of Vinton’s hand-crafted labor of love isn’t taking any chances. The tireless disseminator of world-famous wisecracks wants to pilot his magical airship into Halley’s Comet so he can finally be with his wife Olivia, who died in 1904, a half-decade before her husband of thirty-four years.
The Adventures of Mark Twain is consequently a story about suicide. It’s a bleak yarn about an exhausted old man who has experienced everything life offers, good and bad, and is now ready for eternal sleep alongside his late wife.
The aphorism-dispensing machine's plans to end his life in a blaze of glory are complicated by a trio of stowaways Twain recognizes as his fictional creations. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn furtively enter the aircraft in search of adventure. Becky Sawyer doesn’t want to miss out on the fun/danger, so she joins them.
Mark Twain wrestled with suicidal depression as a young man. The Adventures of Mark Twain depicts his yearning to end his life in a state of perfect synchronicity as a way of accepting, even embracing, his mortality.
Don’t worry: while Twain is dead set on committing suicide at the close of this animated children’s film, he spares the children.
“But Mr. Twain, we’re too young to die!” frets Huckleberry Finn in a line of dialogue that captures the film’s bewildering darkness and obsession with death.
Being a good man, Twain has no interest in turning his suicide into a murder-suicide, so he gives his airship to his young, fictional friends so they don’t all die before reaching puberty.
Before The Adventures of Mark Twain can immerse us in a world of gloom, doom, and despair, we’re first treated to a Claymation adaptation of an 1865 short story that was Twain’s first major success.
The brief vignette is notable mainly because it lacks the grim fixation with death, grief, the afterlife, suicide, and, of course, Satan.
The next yarn Twain shares with his young friends and creations is a wry adaptation of his short stories Eve’s Diary and Extracts from Adam's Diary. In this retelling of the creation myth, Adam and Eve are like the leads in a contemporary romantic comedy.
Even though God created Eve specifically for the first man, the first man and the first woman despise each other initially. They act like they wouldn’t want to be with the other if they were the last person on earth. That’s unfortunately the case. They’re the last people on earth, the first people on earth, and the only people on earth.
This segment offers a revisionist take on the first humans. I am particularly fond of a gag where Adam tries to hide his identity from Eve by wearing Groucho glasses. It’s gloriously absurd because Eve couldn’t possibly mistake him for someone else, on account of him being the only other person on the planet, and because it suggests, impishly, that Groucho glasses pre-dated Groucho Marx’s birth, life, and career by thousands. if not tens of thousands of years.
In romantic comedy tradition, anger and discord eventually lead to love and acceptance when these enemies become lovers and soulmates.
The sequence ends with the death of Eve and a simultaneously distraught and thankful Adam remarking of Eve’s death, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."
In this child-unfriendly children’s movie, Eden is not a place or a state of mind; it’s another person. Adam did not need to die to receive his heavenly reward; he found that instead in Eve.
It’s a heartbreaking moment that tugs relentlessly at the heartstrings while being wildly inappropriate for what is ostensibly a Claymation movie for kiddies.
God is curiously quiet, if not absent, from the proceedings, but the devil makes an appearance so viscerally unnerving that an urban legend spread that this scene was so dark that it was cut from television showings.
The devil can do anything. He is all-powerful. He gives the children clay to make people with. The innocent, mischievous children create not just people but a whole little world out of clay, the building block of life and the essence of Claymation.
Satan gives these clay blobs life so that he can take it away. It takes almost no time for the utopia to devolve into a dystopia. The clay people Tom, Huck, and Becky molded with their hands do what flesh and blood people do: they hate each other, hurt each other, and jockey madly for position and power.
“I find you humans quite interesting even though you are a worthless, greedy allotment,” a figure credited as The Mysterious Stranger observes before squashing clay people under his hand.
Then the Devil makes like God circa Noah’s Ark and unleashes a storm and then an earthquake that destroys the little world the children helped create. The clay sufferers are swallowed up into the earth by a vengeful and angry anti-Christ.
When Huck protests, “You murdered them!” The embodiment of ultimate evil insists, “Never mind them. People are of no value. We can make more sometime if we need them.”
As voiced by Vinton himself in an androgynous whisper, the film’s version of the devil isn’t just too dark for a children’s film; it’d be too dark for a horror movie.
Becky expresses an understandable desire to return home, but Huck is instead confronted by the horrifying, violent image of his enemy Injun Joe.
Children’s films tend to lighten important cultural figures' legacies. They understandably present great Americans in the sunniest, most favorable light.
The Adventures of Mark Twain does the opposite. It darkens Twain’s wholesome, all-American aesthetic by reveling in his cynicism.
At its darkest, Vinton’s film has a particularly despondent Twain say of his impending death, “when I get to the other side, I will use my considerable influence to have the human race drowned again, this time drowned good. No omissions. No ark.”
This version of Twain doesn’t just want to end his own life; he wants to wipe out humanity as a whole. The children are appropriately mortified.
The mustachioed subject of The Adventures of Mark Twain might seem genocidal, but those gloomy sentiments belong to Twain’s dark side. The Adventures of Mark Twain illustrates Jung’s concept of the Shadow Self.
It was not Twain, consequently, who wanted to end all life on earth in addition to his own but rather a dark side that is as important as the side of his personality he shows the world.
The Adventures of Mark Twain was the first clay-animated feature film. While it’s not Toy Story or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, it’s a gorgeously animated, deeply personal, and mesmerizingly dark motion picture.
It merits a place of pride in the pantheon of 80s-era kid’s flicks guaranteed to give the little ones nightmares.
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