Review - Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated

Have you ever come across a movie that you really wanted to love, but no matter how hard you tried you just couldn’t? This is how I felt after watching Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated.

The concept behind Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is really creative and cool. Over 100 artists with varying styles that ranged from animation to puppetry tried their hand at recreating the timeless classic Night of the Living Dead and pieces of those 100+ different versions of the film were strung together to “reanimate” the movie. The first problem came with the choice of animators. Were they all creative? Yes. Were they all good? Not so much so. At times I was wondering if the producers had just put an ad on CraigsList asking “who wants to do their own version of Night of the Living Dead?” The animation process also led to another major problem I had with the film.

For Night of the Living Dead one of the most important aspects of the horror involved is the human emotion displayed by the characters. This is almost entirely lost in the animation process. I’m not saying it’s impossible to create human emotion with an animated character, but the artists who worked on this movie didn’t make it happen. There was little to no reason to feel invested in the characters’ lives, and due to all the cutting from one type of animation to another, one never really gets much of an idea of who’s who.

The terror of being in a zombie infested world, having to rely on people you don’t know, and frantically searching for a radio station that may have someone broadcasting so you can get news on what’s happening should be felt when watching night of the Living Dead, but with Reanimated much of this is lost, and those are the things that made the classic so great.

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated deserves an A for effort and creativity, as, artistically, it’s fairly remarkable, but as a movie, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work.

Enjoyability: 2 out of 5