Vincent & 9

Hello.

My name is Vincent Malloy and I am seven years old, SEVEN, oh that's almost nine. I might as well start digging my grave now. I am smart, I get good grades, and I have a stupid sister. My favorite person in the entire world is Vincent Price, that's why my name is, obviously, Vincent. Often when I am alone I think about torturing my sister, my parents, or my god-awfully rotund aunt. I prefer Edgar Allen Poe to my everyday, ordinary, obnoxiously warm and fuzzy feeling reading that they give me in school, don't they know that's not how life is? Anyway, about Tim. I am an experiment, much as I expected, I don't really exist and I won't ever die. Some animator executives up at the Walt Disney company gave Tim $60,000 to create anything he wanted; since Tim had already written my story and my life existed already in the form of pages and scratch drawings, it was easy for him to switch gears. Tim felt that it would be appropriate to drag my scraggly weak and barely there body from the pages of my book and turn me into clay, every day he played with me like a puppet for hours on end. He "Wanted it to feel real." I was very tired of saying the same few words, and I had memorized my entire life story in a poem. The Disney executives called me a "test in stop animation," Tim called me his masterpiece. Tim and I share a very close connection; we like the same things, we think the same way, people have even said I look just like him, although my vision has been too clouded by morbid thoughts to remember his face. For two excruciatingly long months Tim played with my clay figure, everything in my world was black and white, apparently the film was too. Two months he worked and all he came out with was a five-minute film. Who was going to watch a five minute film? Thanks Tim, I really appreciate the sudden rush to stardom you gave me. The end of my life story is wonderful; "Everyone at Disney thought he died, but he's just laying there, who's to say he's really dead or beautiful in his own little dream world. It really spoke to me." To my surprise my love and other self Vincent Price was the dear and wonderful narrator for my film. I have to say, the second he came to look at my clay figure I was warm and fuzzy inside, starstuck maybe? No. never me. "It's a scary proposition meeting somebody who helped you through childhood, who had that affect on you." Disney ended up really enjoying my film, and they even showed it on the big screen, It is such an incredibly strange feeling to see yourself on the big screen for the first time; exhilarating maybe? I was so happy to hear it won awards in Chicago, and in France...but no one knew what to do with it, or with me when the movie's two week showing ended. My life story was locked into a film canister never to resurface from the depths of the disney vaults. Did I die? Or am I just laying there in some beautiful dream?

Tim's conceptualization & drawings for the book, then the film