I love this movie so much

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Not sure why the average ratings ... I found this quite beautiful.Its only flaw is how short it is, however its gorgeous visuals, voice acting and symphonic music more than atone. The final short did not need narrating because its clear what the message is. I loved how different they all were, intententinaly so, and believe it or not voice matters. The first short was Gothic perfection! The second not my favorite, but it was good. The Third and Fourth had some suspense and horror in it and the final one had an excellent theme. There is not much to say about an animated tribute to EAP work summed up in 117 minutes or so, but this came close enough to say plenty. Final Grade -A

A pretty good animated anthology of Edgar Allen Poe stories. Raul Garcia directs them all, but they are done in different styles (though the skeleton of all of them is CGI similar to earlier GKids release The Painting). Four of the five tales are greatest hits Poe stories: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death. The other is the less well known The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. There's also a wraparound segment with a crow visiting the cemetery statues of some of Poe's famous heroines. The Fall of the House of Usher is a tad weak - I didn't like the character designs and it moves too quickly (I did like the narration by Christopher Lee). The rest are better. The Tell-Tale Heart is narrated by a resurrected Bela Lugosi - well, they found an old record with his recording of the story, anyway. It's cool. Guillermo del Toro provides excellent narration on The Pit and the Pendulum. My favorite was probably The Masque of the Red Death, which has a gorgeous, painterly color palate. It also dispenses with the narration and is mostly silent (would have been even better if the one spoken line in the short had been dropped altogether, but I guess props are due since the one line is uttered by none other than Roger Corman). Sergio de la Puente's score is good if overused sometimes. It's particularly great during The Masque of the Red Death segment.

Before I begin my review, I just have to make a statement. You wouldn't ask a vegetarian to review a steak house, or a film maker to tell you how to fix your car. So, when you see reviews from philistines complaining about the 'quality of the audio recording of Bela Lugosi', or complaining about the animation style, just picture the reviewer as a fully snow-suited Eskimo in a sauna, and ignore their complaints. Moving on...I saw this when it was first released to streaming services, and wrote down my thoughts in an Edgar Allan Poe Facebook group. Now that it's on Netflix, I've revisited, and re-experienced a lot of the same feelings. Here are my thoughts:1) There is a great atmosphere of dread, or "October, the season of death" as Ray Bradbury may call it, over the entire anthology. I love this. Very "sparse" feeling, if that makes sense.2) I really like the original wraparound story. In fact, once the two main characters were positively identified, I found that the wraparound was probably the most creepy and thoughtful of all presentations in the film. However, I don't believe that the voice actor was well chosen to portray the character that he was supposed to be. They needed a more fitting voice for the foreboding style, instead of one that sounds like a generic television family dad. Also, the character's dialogue should've been more poetic. It was too plain for the character portrayed.3) The Tell-Tale Heart segment is simply awesome. They take Bela Lugosi's original audio recording of his reading of the story (from the 1930s, I believe), complete with scratches and audio artifacts, layered over a modern musical score, and very noir-ish / Frank Miller-ish animation. It would've harmed the piece if they removed the scratches and audio artifacts from Lugosi's reading. I'm glad they didn't.4) All stories in the film had narration and/or voice-overs, except for the final story, The Masque Of The Red Death. The only voice in the entire piece is Prince Prospero (Roger Corman) when he spots The Red Death. I believe it was a huge mistake to not narrate the story. It would've been much better to hear Poe's words while seeing the visual. Without the narration, it's almost more of a background piece than an actual story. Although the visual is still beautiful.5) The fade-to-black, fade-to-zero decibel bumpers/dividers between stories and wraparound pieces created too much of a division between sections. They should've run together better. It was almost as if it was 5 separate episodes, instead of a continuous anthology, as was intended.I would definitely recommend it for any fan of Poe. Or even as an introduction to Poe for anybody who hasn't yet become a fan of his.

"Extraordinary Tales" is an animated film which consists of five Edgar Allen Poe stories and the notion of such an animated project sounds very exciting. I was also excited because the reviews I read on this were rather positive. Imagine my surprise when the film began and the computer graphics looked as if they were created back in the late 1990s! In fact, almost any video game you'd buy today would look nicer. The characters are sometimes blocky, there is little fluidity and the film just looks cheap at the beginning of the picture. The quality, unfortunately, was generally this poor throughout. Perhaps the praise for this is because a lot of people love Poe. Additionally, several amazingly good actors provide voices for the characters...such as Christopher Lee, Roger Corman, Guillermo del Toro and even, oddly, Bela Lugosi (using archival a rather archaic archival recording). But with these talents and this writer, it should have been magnificent....not an ugly mess of an animated film that looks as if some first-year film students created it. Each of the five stories is animated very differently in style...but all are rather lacking, though the fifth story at least was interesting when it came to the animation style. I cannot ignore the glaring ugliness of the CGI and only focus on the stories and voice actors. For my time, I'd much rather just listen to audio records of the stories by these voice actors. This just debuted on DVD from Netflix...don't say I didn't warn you.