The Tom Waits song turned into an animated short
Surely, there’s no other artist who provides more ammunition for strange animation studios than Tom Waits.
For the last four decades, his entire shtick has been surreal imagery that veers from cheerfully whimsical to disturbingly gothic on a whim. Even before that, storytelling was the backbone of his songwriting.
There’s more pathos in the heartbreaking reveals in ‘Martha’ and ‘Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis’ than in a hundred hours of so-called prestige television. Yet, after Swordfishtrombones in 1983, the subjects of Waits’ work became a hundred times stranger.
Suddenly, his novelist’s eye for detail wasn’t being used to paint pictures of down-on-their-luck boozehounds and the sorrow in their hearts, but communities of strange creatures living under our feet, office drone serial killers, and even pirates in a Singaporean dock.
All as imaginative as they were cursed, and they were extremely imaginative. You’d think that an animation studio would be itching to turn any one of them into some surrealist dreamscape, yet despite a number of his songs appearing in animated films, this has only happened once, with a much more recent song than you’d expect.
However, the song used is one of the most ideal picks for an animated adaptation. Taken from Waits’ 2004 masterpiece Real Gone, ‘Circus’ is a spooky spoken word story of Waits fraternising with the stars of a hellish big top. Characters like Horse Face Ethel, One Eyed Myra, Yodelling Elaine and Zuzu Bolin drifting in and out of a narrative that reads like a dream you can’t quite tell is a nightmare or not. It was crying out for a visual companion, and in 2016, record label Waxploitation provided one.
The medium was their book Stories for Ways and Means, a tome of “grown-up” children’s stories where songs by everyone from Laura Marling to Nick Cave were taken and adapted into stories by some of the greatest painters of the day.
As accompaniment, the book was packaged with a CD containing a bespoke soundtrack for each story, with the lyrics read out by actors and performers like Danny Devito, Zach Galifianakis and Nick Offerman.
‘Circus’, read in the inimitable rumble of Ken Nordine and illustrated with flair by Joe Coleman, is one of the highlights of the whole book. So much so that it was animated and uploaded to YouTube below.
The combination is so good that it makes you wonder how many more of Waits’ classics could be turned into animated shorts. However, perhaps that’s just it. To do justice to Waits’ work takes time, effort and craft, the kind that not many people are willing to give.
Rather than hope for something that probably won’t come any time soon, in that case, it’s best to do the next best thing, and try to create your own works in tribute, and create your own worlds for future generations to get lost in.