Check out this gorgeous animated film, The Boundaries of Life and Death by director and animator Saskia Kretzschmann.
This film is infinitely better than any John Cusack film could ever be. Animators have been translating Poe's words and vision for some time. I recommend UPA's The Tell Tale Heart, narrated by James Mason, from 1953. The film uses limited animation to tell its story, which differs from the Disney studio's work by using fewer animated cels, emphasizing sound, and employing a moving camera over the animated cels.
I also recommend The Masque of the Red Death created by the Zagreb studio in the former Yugoslavia in 1969. Again, this film uses limited animation to tell its harrowing account of the plague run amok.
All three films have a haunted, painterly quality, even though Kretzschmann's film utilizes contemporary computer technologies. She knows her antecedents, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kretzschmann drew influences from Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) as well. Reiniger worked tirelessly for three years on this brilliant animated film, hand-cutting the backgrounds and the shadow puppets, and then animating them frame by frame with the very first multi-plane camera. She had some assistance from Berthold Bartosch and Walter Ruttman as well.
