"The Halloween Tree" - My Favorite Halloween Cartoon

Everyone can name a favorite Christmas cartoon. "Charlie Brown," "Rudolph," "Frosty," "The Grinch," "The Snowman," and all the rest are beloved holiday traditions. But what about cartoons for the other big kid-centric holiday, Halloween? Animation enthusiasts can still count on "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" the yearly "Treehouse of Horror" installments of "The Simpsons," and "The Nightmare Before Christmas," but there's no denying the pickings are slimmer. The networks will premiere Halloween 'toons regularly, like the new "Shrek" Halloween special airing tomorrow night, but they rarely endure year after year. My personal favorite is one of the exceptions, a 1993 made-for-television feature adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree." As childhood nostalgia has begun been hitting Gen-Y, it's started to creep on to many lists of the best Halloween cartoons. Narrated by Bradbury himself, it begins like this:

"It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much wilderness around you couldn't see the town. But on the other hand there wasn't so much town you couldn't see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of fences to walk on, and sidewalks to skate on, and the muted cries and laughter of boys and girls, full of costume dreams and pumpkin spirits, preparing for the greatest night of the year. Better than Easter, better than Christmas… Halloween."

A small gang of trick-or-treaters, dressed as the classic skeleton, mummy, witch, and monster, are troubled to learn that their friend Pip has been carted off the the hospital with appendicitis. But then they see a spectral figure who looks like Pip, and it leads them to a house of haunts on the outskirts of town. There they meet Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, a ghoulish figure voiced by Leonard Nimoy who will serve as guide and host for the evening. The specter of Pip steals away one of Moundshroud's jack o' lanterns, possibly containing Pip's soul, and uses it to escape TARDIS-style into the past. Moundshroud gives chase with the other kids in tow, following Pip to ancient Egypt, the Feast of Samhain at Stonehenge, the building of Notre Dame cathedral, and Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. And along the way, he provides some illumination on the origins of Halloween and the kids' familiar costumes.

"The Halloween Tree" won a few awards upon its initial release, and was rebroadcast several times on Turner cable channels like TNT and Cartoon Network during the 90s. It also aired on a few syndicated stations, which is where I first saw it, but over the last decade it's largely disappeared from sight. There was a VHS release, but the feature has yet to find its way to DVD. I'm not surprised that many people of a certain age remember and cherish it, and that others have either never heard of it or dismiss it as low-grade kids' fodder. "The Halloween Tree" was one of the projects created by Hanna Barbera studios during its brief creative revival in the early 90s after they were acquired by Turner. Though the studio put obvious effort into the production, the animation quality is only just adequate, and the character designs are a little too reminiscent of the endless Hanna Barbera "Scooby Doo" direct-to-video series.

However, the strengths of the feature far outweigh its weaknesses. There's a wonderful score by John Debney, Bradbury himself wrote the adaptation - the teleplay is included with a later edition of the 1972 "Halloween Tree" novel - and Nimoy's Moundshroud is a fantastic creature of the night. The story has more than enough educational material to make "The Halloween Tree" classroom appropriate, which is where many fans first encountered it, but it's also far darker and more emotionally charged than the bulk of similar material aimed at children. What impressed me on my first viewing, when I was well past the age of being Too Old For Cartoons, was that the adventure involved serious stakes and consequences, and that it took real sacrifice to get everyone home again. Not only the accouterments of death, but death itself was central to the story. Not many in children's programming are brave enough to do that these days.

Also, though I may grumble about the animation, there are some striking visuals. We're treated to a living kite made of the wild beasts from circus posters, Notre Dame assembling itself under the moonlit sky, and the Halloween Tree of the title, which is adorned not with autumn leaves but with countless glowing jack o' lanterns. Helped in no small part by Bradbury's own text, "The Halloween Tree" does a very good job of translating the feel and mood of Bradbury's work, which Hollywood has often had trouble with. Grown-ups will appreciate the nostalgic, melancholy atmosphere. Kids should love the supernatural adventure, though the modest scares are probably too much for the littlest ones.

I hope more people discover and rediscover this one as time goes by, because I think there are the genuine makings of a perennial classic here. "The Halloween Tree" has become one of my yearly traditions, and I honestly can't think of Halloween without it.