Now, the story of Faust doesn’t really have an exact plot, since most interpretations are having fun tweaking elements of the Faust Legend to suit their purposes for the better, but it doesn’t matter who’s really telling the story, for it’s already had some kind of overarching theme to it.

The main character, the Faust of the title, is some guy who got tired and sick of his life because it ain’t going places no more.

And so, in order to improve himself, the Faust guy made a deal with a demonic and devilish you know who?

Well, look!

Look way up in the sky!

Is it a bird?

Is it a plane?

Is it Superman?

No, my friends:

Rather, it’s the Mephisto Man from Faust, pictured here flying over some German village!

Anyway, to improve himself along with his life, Faust made a deal with some devilish demon who goes by the name of Mephistopheles, or Mephisto, for short, just to give the guy permission for greatness in his life, and in all various forms, but the guy also had to sign away his soul which the Mephisto man will come back and claim for all his very own!

The appeal of this legendary German story, and why it lasted so long, is its very universal relations and the ease with which it can also be located to a more recent format.

Now the legendary story of Faust actually dates back to 1400s Germany, where the story spreads as a very popular piece of folklore that came in the form of cheap stories and rather immature plays.

But 200 years on from that, Christopher Marlowe gave the Faust legend its very first proper treatment in a play called Dr. Faustus, a play that still stands as one of the story’s great interpretations.

And nearly 200 years after that, Faust’s next great incarnation was born in the form of Goethe’s two parter play, which is titled simply Goethe’s Faust, and which has probably the most inspirations and the most influences over more modern understandings of the Faust story.

And from that day forward, and continuing all the way to more modern times, the artistic world is just as fascinated with the legend of the Faust guy who signs a deal that will have a demon buy his soul when the guy’s done with it, and the story inspires everything that you and I can imagine: operas, paintings, and movies like F.W. Marnau’s 1920s take on the Faust guy and the Mephisto Man:

Since my ancestral blood is equal parts American, Scottish (on my dad's ancestral side), and, of course, German (on my mom's ancestral side), Maybe I might as well someday take a shot at the Faust legend, probably to modernize and transpose the full complete text of Goethe’s two part play of the Faust Legend to modern America or so, and take inspiration from both parts of Goethe’s Faust play and use Goethe's two part play as the starting block, but I might still keep many things good about Goethe’s Faust Parts One and Two and other incarnations of the Faust legend as well as especially many of the themes in both parts of Goethe's play intact, however modernized these elements might become.

My planned animated take of Faust Parts One and Two might as well be painstakingly crafted (mostly by hand, but with some digital ink and paint scenes and some CGI elements thrown in) over the course of 10, 20, 30, or 40 years or less, by animators young and/or old, especially legendary ones that are alumni of or future soon to be employees of Disney, Warner Bros., Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, DreamWorks, Don Bluth studios, Ken Duncan Studio or especially Pixar, with me as shepherd and director and with me taking up other stuff so that production could continue on my epic two-volume animated cartoon take on the Faust legend.

((Hopefully, me using all that money and acclaim that I shall earn from doing other stuff to pipe funds into any of my passion projects for decades or so to come is actually a rare type of dedication seen only in actual filmmakers/auteurs like Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, or Terrence Malick. Just saying!))

Hopefully, I intended for my modernized epic two volume animated cartoon take on the Faust legend or especially the full complete text of both parts one and two of Goethe’s Faust play to be something of an epic masterpiece of animation, whether mostly hand drawn or sometimes computer generated.

And hopefully my modernized epic two volume animated cartoon take on the story of Faust will also contain some of the most stunning, dynamic, intricate, complicated and/or carefully designed scenes in animation in recent memory, whether 2D hand drawn or 3D CGI, and with a radically bizarre and multi-cultural foreign and cinematic look, style and feel,  a modernized 21st century American take or so of the various incarnations of the Faust legend, particularly the full complete text of Goethe’s two part Faust play, and a dollop of old/classic Cartoon Network style uniqueness in all its animation art and design styling, my two volume epic animated cartoon take on the Faust legend will hopefully be one of those perfect things, a possible fulcrum between highbrow and lowbrow and a personal, vibrant project to be impractically done on a never before seen and grandly epic scale.

It would want to do what has never been done before, but in ways that won’t call attention to themselves. And as technically impressive as it is, it would also hopefully be a modernized transposition of a great two part play based on a German legend to a contemporary USA setting or something like that.

I always wanted to do a modernized yet visually lush two part animated cartoon epic retelling of the Faust legend, and I may pick at it while doing other stuff.

And some of my art styling may get more and more complex as time wore on. Yes, 2d traditional hand drawn cel cartoon animation as we know it and love had gone largely out of style now, replaced with 3D CGI-rendered stuff like Frozen, Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Big Hero 6 and most recently Zootopia. I am an amazing person, and I am sometimes brilliant an artist, no matter how terrible or bad my art can get sometimes, but sometimes, I want to become the best and greatest animator I ever could become, and either Dexter’s Odyssey or my own modernized and visually lush two volume animated cartoon epic version of the Faust legend is going to be my way to learn about all that.

Maybe I’ll probably hire not only some of the great lights of 90s Hollywood animation, especially those from the 80s and 90s Disney Renaissance, but also some of the great lights of old classic Cartoon Network animation during CN’s 1990s and early 2000s TV prime, to all pass on all their knowledge for newer, more future generations of younger artists and people. before all that knowledge and 2D hand drawn animation as we all know it will otherwise be lost forever.

And hopefully, either Dexter or Faust (or at least my own modernized and visually lush, two volume animated epic cartoon take on the Faust legend) will be a great epic work of genius, plain and simple, for it may contain some of the most complex and some of the most delightfully subtle animations at least in recent memory, whether hand drawn or CGI, and beautiful cinematography (probably in some anamorphic 70mm widescreen 2.76:1 aspect ratio format called Ultra Panavision, which was famously used in William Wyler’s 1959 Ben-Hur (particularly everybody’s most favorite Ben-Hur scene of all time, the Chariot Race) and was recently used on Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight movie last year), and some beautiful lighting effects, as well as every single in-camera trick (and every digital trick) in the book and a hundred tricks which are not. 

Either the Dexter’s Odyssey project or else my own modernized and visually lush two volume animated cartoon epic take on the Faust legend will not even technically be your ordinary Disney movie, for either project will be something absolutely unique, with designs coming straight from Disney or old Cartoon Network shows or UPA cartoons or classic Warner Bros or MGM cartoons or especially Japanese animation influences, and may probably use design trends from all these aforementioned animation art and design styles plus world art styles, as well as ideas which will be all its own and unique for my take on the Faust legend.

And yes, sure, some or many of the characters (or especially those of Faust and Mephisto (Mephistopheles)) may look like they will all come straight from old episodes of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory:

or Samurai Jack:

or especially old classic episodes from Craig McCracken’s Powerpuff Girls:

But they could still move with perfect fluidity, whether they all be realistic like a Disney feature animation from the 90s, or stylized like old Cartoon Network episodes from Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls and/or Samurai Jack.

It’ll all be a dream, and the whole thing (either Dexter’s Odyssey or maybe my modernized two volume animated cartoon epic take on the Faust legend) will all be in the language of a dream within a dream within a dream…

And it’ll be like you and I realizing that there is a whole entire half of a movie following the intermission of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), or realizing that Adam is not just sticking his pointer finger at the sky on the Sistine Chapel as rendered by Michelangelo.

Anyway, my apologies for writing such a very long (read: TL;DR-worthy) post, and sure, yes, you don’t have to read ALL OF IT if you want to, but what would you think of all that?

And which may I do for a change?

Either Dexter’s Odyssey or some modernized and visually lush, two volume, animated cartoon epic take on the German legend of Faust?

You decide!!