Sunday, October 2, 2011 Z is for Zombie: Night of the Living Dead - Reanimated

N is for Night of the Living Dead - Reanimated
US, 2009

The Zombies: Classic Romero ghouls.  Duh.

The Source: Unknown.  There's some hoo-hah about a Venus probe, but nothing is ever confirmed.

The Result:  A bona fide classic that inspired an entire genre of horror.  Now with puppets.

Begun as an internet project, N is for Night of the Living Dead - Reanimated collects the work of nearly 150 international artists and animators who chose their favorite scenes from the classic film and re-envisioned them through their own artwork, with no restrictions on style, media or process.

This is definitely not the best way to experience the story for the first time, as some of the art styles make things difficult for a novice to follow. Yet the more abstract animations were some of my favorite segments. At one point the ghouls surrounding the house are reduced to flashes of white motion in the darkness that are still quite frightening on a primal level; the peaked triangle shapes evoke KKK hoods as they closed in on poor, doomed Ben.

I also loved the stop-motion segments using material such as Lego, paper cut-outs, and dolls (including "official" NotLD figures). And yes, puppetry is represented, by some clever use of hand puppets and some really beautiful shadow puppetry.

Some styles are repeated too often, so that at times it feels like the entire project is dominated by only a handful of contributors. Maybe they were simply the most prolific artists involved, but I can't help feeling that there had to be a better choice than returning again and again to the clumsy Poser-like CGI used by one "animator"; off-the shelf models that look nothing like the characters in the film, on sets that resemble nothing from the movie, moving crudely in ways that do not match the action in the original.  Especially since the brief glimpses we get of the Lego stop-motion and shadow puppetry (to pick two examples) definitely left me wanting more.

But the merits of Night of the Living Dead - Reanimated outweigh its flaws. It serves as a great example of the creative and innovative work that can be done with public domain films - and serves as a reminder why we have the public domain in the first place.

3.5 Ghouls