Animating the Reanimated Turns Up Dead
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.
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