The Addams Family endures through time
New animated film continues to build on what macabre cartoonist started
Charles Addams’ ashes may well be interred at his Hamptons estate, but the creatures sired by his macabre imagination refuse to die.
The clan of cartoon matriarch Morticia Addams first moved into the pages of The New Yorker magazine eight decades ago, and the ghoulish characters finally got names in 1964, when The Addams Family found a prime-time TV home for two seasons and snapped their ooky-kooky way into the American consciousness.
The numerous adaptations since, in film and on Broadway, have brought Oscar nominations, and Morticia remains a mother of reinvention.
As a Halloween-ready animated film, The Addams Family features the voices as Charlize Theron, Oscar Isaac, Chloë Grace Moretz and Finn Wolfhard.
But just what is it about this oddly gothic brood that keeps audiences gleefully returning?
Conrad Vernon, who directed the new movie with Greg Tiernan, grew up on reruns of the hit ’60s series. An illustrator, he would eventually be drawn into the Addams catalogue of lush and dark-toned New Yorker cartoons.
Vernon was initially bewitched by the show’s quirkier creature aspects — “All that stuff was really fun,” he says — but the lure of what was beating beneath kept him tuned in.
“At its core, it was a family that really cared and loved each other,” says Vernon (Monsters vs. Aliens, Sausage Party). “As frightened as I might have been as a kid by the stuff in their house, I always knew that Morticia and (husband) Gomez loved their children and wanted the best for them. It kind of made you feel safe in this unsafe environment.”
Besides some of the previous screen projects, the filmmakers kept returning to the source illustration for inspiration.
“Addams is one of the few New Yorker cartoonists who was consistently laugh-out funny,” says Françoise Mouly, the magazine’s art editor since 1993. “From his first cartoon in 1932 to a few years after his death in 1988, we published 1,200 of his drawings and 64 covers, and they aged well.”
Few of The New Yorker’s gag cartoonists have created such a consistent esthetic and coherent world view that the work can survive decades of worthy adaptation. Such a “rare feat,” Mouly says, with “the most consistent thread being his embrace of the free spirits, of the deviant and the dreamers among us.”
“In a 1986 cover,” Mouly says by way of example, “the artist known to picnic in graveyards gave us a witch lovingly sharing a taste of bubbling stew with her black cat.”
And by working behind the black mask of the macabre, Addams felt free to satirize social conventions, including the pressure to conform. (The new animated film plays off that motif, with a villain whose reality-show goal is blind communal assimilation.)
“He set out to undermine clichés,” Mouly says. “His target was conventional wisdom and conformity, but in crafting his loving portrayal of loners and monsters, he established archetypes that survived the test of time” — including the Addams children, Wednesday and Pugsley, plus looming butler Lurch (voiced by Vernon in the new movie), odd Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) and the potion-happy Grandma (Bette Midler). Often, to pierce those social facades, the best rapier was the wit of the weird.
“Addams was one of the first to realize how much weirdness could be tolerated in a cartoon — how far apart the frames of reference could be and still mash up to make a joke work,” says Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor for Air Mail and CartoonCollections.com.
“He tapped into the paranoia that is with us now more than ever” and poked at our capacity for evil, continues Mankoff, a longtime New Yorker cartoonist and cartoon editor. (Some of Addams’ animal covers even seem to depict death camps.)
In doing so, Addams’ work unmasks fear of “the other.”
“We laugh at Addams’ cartoons because they giddily burst through the polite conventions that shield us from our fear of death and decay and of those who aren’t like us,” Mouly says.
“But it’s well worth going beyond the flying bats and the gnashing of teeth — if we want to embrace diversity, the first step might be to understand that whoever we are, we are loved.”