Animating the Reanimated Turns Up Dead

            Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In - 10/4/21

 By Joe Bob Briggs

    NEW YORK—Well, it sounded like a cute idea.

    I heard that somebody put together an animated version of George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead.

    This had to be an obsessed fan in Youngstown doing stop-motion in his attic, right?

    Or maybe it was a low-level inker at Marvel who went home every night to her walk-up apartment in Queens and painstakingly drew digital versions of Barbara, Ben, Johnny, Harry Cooper and the rest of the cast, saving the zombies for last because they would be the most fun.

    Maybe it was a “reimagining” of the story originally written by John Russo for Romero. Something like Tom Savini did with his 1990 remake—lovingly faithful to the characters, but with unique twists that catch us off guard.

    Whatever it was, it had to be a passion project, right? Nobody puts that much time and effort into a homage unless they worship the film and worship Romero.

    Wrong.

    Backed by big-studio money, directed by an acclaimed animator who does million-dollar commercials, staffed with A-list voice talent including Katharine Isabelle of Ginger Snaps fame, with so many people working on it that the credits go on for seven minutes, Night of the Animated Dead has the soul of Saran Wrap on a three-day-old cookie. It’s basically a paint-by-numbers Xerox that added color to the identical shots in the original movie—including all kinds of massive blood spewing whenever a zombie gets wasted—but forgot to add color to the story itself.

    Jason Axinn, the director, had a highly praised first feature called To Your Last Death two years ago at London’s Frightfest, but that film was noted more for its blood-soaked gore than its emotional impact. The same is true here. In Night of the Animated Dead, Romero’s characters become specimens instead of the flawed but sympathetic victims of the original. This is especially true in the case of the Harry Cooper character. Karl Hardman played it straight down the middle in 1968 so that you were able to see that his hard-headedness derived from his desire to protect his wife and daughter. As voiced by Josh Duhamel in the animated version, he’s just a selfish prick. (It’s not Duhamel’s fault. It’s drawn and written that way. Cooper’s face is feckless and sinister.) The Barbara character, too, becomes one-dimensional as she just babbles incoherently or stares straight ahead in a catatonic state, so you don’t get the Judith O’Dea tenderness. (Barbara is voiced by Katharine Isabelle, but again, it’s not her fault that the animation gives her nowhere to go.)

    The reason for the lack of character depth seems to derive from the choice of animation style. The characters move in that herky-jerky mode characteristic of shorts normally seen at the Festival of East European Animation with titles like Reflection or Random Labyrinth or Hedgehog in Caligari’s Court. In other words, they don’t bother to sculpt the bodies so that we start to feel they are more than just symbols of people. We’ve already seen the real people in the real movie, so it seems like this would just be basic, but we have far too many moments of Ben being a cardboard bad-ass (voiced by Dule Hill), Harry being a cardboard coward, and Tom and Judy being a pair of cardboard lovebirds making bad decisions.

    Far from being a fan-based love letter to the zombie classic, Night of the Animated Dead seems to be created by a bunch of suits in a conference room. The companies claiming it are Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, The Long Game (no idea, unless it’s the San Francisco company that sells gaming apps), an indie company called Hemisphere Entertainment, with an Executive Producer credit going to Tom DeFeo, publisher of Fangoria during its leanest years. And if you’re wondering why 95 percent of the names in the credits are Hispanic, it’s because the whole thing was drawn, colored and animated at Demente Studios in Guadalajara, a “cost-effective” outsourcing company for producers looking to do animation on the cheap.

    But the most telling indicator that the writer’s room was devoid of horror fans is the comments of the director himself. Asked what inspired him to do an animated version of Night of the Living Dead, Jason Axinn’s answer was, “The project was started before I came on.”

    In other words, nobody knows why it exists.

    They’re coming to get us, Barbara.

    Let’s take a look at those drive-in totals. We have:

46 dead bodies.

One car crash.

One zombie stampede.

Multiple exploding heads.

Crowbar through the eyeball.

Crowbar through the noggin.

Tombstone head-bashing.

Multiple rifle shots through the brain.

Exploding gas station.

Exploding truck followed by zombie picnic.

Zombie-toasting.

Zombie wrestling.

Hand-slicing.

Arm-hacking.

Daddy-munching.

Rock to the head.

Window-bashing.

Gratuitous sofa destruction.

Gratuitous black-and-white news bulletins about the Venus Probe.

Gratuitous wolf howl.

Heads roll.

Hands roll.

Arms roll.

Crowbar Fu.

Molotov cocktail Fu.

Bonfire Fu.

Face-slap Fu.

Torch Fu.

Garden-spade Fu.

Meat-hook Fu.

Shotgun Fu.

Shot-for-shot Fu.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for

Jimmy Simpson as Johnny, the first to die;

Katharine Isabelle as Barbara, the catatonic cutie;

Josh Duhamel as Harry Cooper, the voice of common-sense Middle America;

Dule Hill as Ben, for channeling Duane Jones and saying “I oughta drag you out there and feed you to those things!”; and

Nima Fakhrara, the Iranian composer who is responsible for the best part of this whole thing, the music.

Two stars. Joe Bob says check it out.