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Deprived of the parodic cut of “Star Wars Uncut,” and the childlike awe of “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation,” “Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated” is a new kind of diabolical beast, a mash-up that aims to blend various media into a blueprint for new artistic interpretation.
Directed Schneider, the documentary uses the audio of Romero’s original movie which came out in 1968 along with and has over a hundred uncredited contributors providing new animation to accompany it. Schneider likely picked the film due to the public accessibility of the franchise. As with everyone who picks a franchise they have immense freedom to cartoon gory characters Romero created in the cut he uses. Schneider unlike most who repurpose the IP takes a more professional angle and actually circulated the project on social media. This method led to professionals and amateurs sending cuts to him. Similar to how “Star Wars Uncut” altered the other franchises.
The movie is not a reimagination nor does it seek to substitute the work that was initially produced. However, the filmmakers argue that it acts as a response towards the original movie. Therefore, there is an assumption that the filmmakers had complete insight of Romero’s work, and that is why they tried to target those people who know the original work. However, as I have mentioned earlier, the style of the work ranges from artist to artist and some of the contributions go as low as 1 second. This makes it impractical to categorize Reanimated as a sourced story, to an extent in which the best animations tend to be the most abstract.
One recurrent piece (which is perhaps the best the movie has to offer) transforms every character into almost featureless blobs connected in their middles by insane scribbles, kind of like an angry relative of stick figures. There’s a beauty in how these figures smoothly move and transform on the screen while simple forms occupy the background, almost suggesting the outline of the farmhouse’s interior. It would be futile to try to grasp this without any context of ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ but that is the point: Scheider is extrapolating from the film that has captivated its audience and is poking fun at every miniscule detail, using the art as a medium. There is no need to follow the plot because we have seen the movie a million ways, and instead we are ‘asked’ to be in awe of the reinterpretations of those images.
The work of Schneider and friends is engaging and impressive knowing that it is many levels above “fan art.” The black and white images get jaw dropping, stunning us with beautifully drawn , intricately pencil animated and unusual experimental work.
Unfortunately, ‘Reanimated’ is seldom at its finest. Schneider has declared himself the film’s curator, and to promote it as a gallery in which various pieces of artwork are linked by a central idea, regretfully becomes the tip of the iceberg. Heameworked barely lets us relax which causes him to edit excessively to fit everything into one piece, which ultimately creates a conceptual disaster. Since this was a collaborative voluntary work, perhaps he believed it was necessary to include everyone, which is enough to give us phenomenal animation paired with unimaginative cheapness to give a most uncomfortable effect.
Regardless of how terrible the effect is, it seems like everyone did want to take the old man, the corpse that was found upstairs, the zombie girl who ended up murdering her mother, while the boring parts like Barbara walking around the house, or all of them just simply watching the news, did happen to be out of the picture. Because of this gap, the movie utilizes lengthy, and rather dull shots of characters being reborn into a world such as Sims and turns into a never-ending imagination-fueled barrage of images.
There is no doubt that works labeled ‘lesser’ are devoid of artistic merit. There is zero creativity. There are a multitude of astonishing abstract photographs, however, there are a lot more where people at home applied minimalistic software to animate blocky 3D characters. Or even worse, they added dull Photoshop filters to video footage of the original film. That is the closest thing to art that I am able to create. For instance, twisting the color dial on my vintage television to make Fred Flintstone green.
Others try and fail on an even larger scale because they focus only on making the participants laugh. One shot includes people wearing sock puppets, while another, albeit more colorfully, transforms the entire thing into a retro cartoon with cats and mice as the main characters. These bits would be appealing if the whole movie was like this, making people watch for fun. But since so many other scenes are meant to be super (no pun intended) serious, the ‘funny’ clips are so utterly different and intrusive that it becomes a problem. This leaves us with a puzzling question, what is the aim of putting these clips anyway, and if its for laughing, why exactly do we laugh?
Cutting edge sketches alongside bad CG and other shots of Furbys doesnt just lose its novelty instantly but erases its entire effect. Schneider mixes the elements into a visual goulash that is far more frustrating than exhilirating. And as a reply to Romero cutting edge sketches alongside stood Furbys loses idea. Reanimated adds too little of actual value, leaving the original’s powerful themes and unforgettable fright are not diluted, but choked completely. A compilation of Living Dead inspired artwork may have worked magically as a coffee table book, but as this mesmerizing book? Its a chaotic dash through the internet, set on random mode.
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