Where's my genius grant?: Excerpt from piece on the 1949 and 1972 animated versions of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Thursday 10/8/26

No writing in the world like this person's writing, no matter what he's writing. AI--please. We could be here indefinitely and AI would never be able to do this. The only writer in the world who couldn't be replaced by it or mistaken for it. I should be getting one of those MacArthur genius grants of $800,000 pretty soon, right? Because they go to real life geniuses, no? What? You're kidding me. It doesn't work that way in the slightest? Huh. Really? Are you sure?

But look at this. Behold. What can you even call it? "Film criticism" doesn't do it justice. It's its own thing. Everything this guy does is always its own thing and nothing else is remotely similar.

The third grader who watches at school on the Friday before Halloween isn’t apt to pick up on the social commentary and those truths of human nature. Their takeaway will be the horror component, and goodness knows how many of them it subsequently kept up at night, which is healthy. A kind of joyous fear. You understand the look and feel—the psychical signage—of timeless horror. The deathlessness of that Indian corn, pumpkin patch, steeple-against-a-blue sky spirit of early Americana. You’re now a Sleepy Hollow boy or girl, the same as those forgathering—tarrying—residents who never die in this town visited and conjured through imagination and the associative, shared memory (once entry is gained) of what’s both a freshly settled and primordial New World nestled along the banks of northeast rivers and harbors leading to sea. A land of shadows by the fire, pumpkins on the doorstep, cider barrels, covered bridges traversed by blown leaves and, if he’s lucky, a pedagogue escaping a Hessian straight out of hell—who could also just be someone having the best Halloween costume moment ever—by making it to that bridge in time. A bridge connects, connection saves. There’s a metaphor in there, as Irving’s tale also connects with us.

The Disney adaptation is a cornucopia. Think of the heaping table favored by Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present. No hollow horns in this sleepy hollow. Conversely, the thirteen-minute animated version from 1972 directed by Sam Weiss and narrated by horror veteran John Carradine (Bluebeard, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula) is lean, angular, flinty, baked rather than bubbling, sharp-edged. It resembles cut-paper figures and scenes come to life. The Disney treatment was baroque; this is folk. Crosby’s voice is mellifluous; Carradine’s scratches and is itself incised. This isn’t recitative at the opera house; it’s an old-timer in a Colonial tavern, sawdust underfoot, leaning close to tell you a tale he’s told many times over to a traveler or new resident for the price of a foam-headed flagon of ale.

This Ichabod changes colors. He may be muted or charged. Sometimes he’s orange, blue, red, pinkish, and then green come the denouement. The art stuns like that of the opening scenes of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown when we have the presence of mind to pause and consider it as one would a work hanging in a museum. It’s as if the colors extend a mile deep into the screen and have leeched to the surface where once they were wet but now have the texture of pastels dried out and cracked by the still-hot sun. A burnishing of autumn.

Irving’s tale is the urban legend variant of folk art, before urbanity existed in the nascent republic. Ichabod’s legs make the shape of two Zs when he sits at the piano in the Weiss film. He’s a seasoned Ichabod here; not quite a dirty old man, but less the callow fop of the Disney treatment. Then again, do people like that ever change? Does anyone? Or do changed circumstances (job, location, marriage status) obfuscate the hampering immutability—and resistance to growth—of all but the fewest of us?