Night of the Animated Dead (2021) is an adult animated horror film directed by Jason Axinn (who also made To Your Last Death). It follows the pretty familiar story of the original movie (Night of the Living Dead from 1968 by George A. Romero): Barbara and her brother John are going to visit their father’s grave in a cemetery in Pennsylvania. Simultaneously, a zombie outbreak causes the corpses to reanimate all over the country, and when John is attacked by one of the zombies, Barbara flees to a nearby farmhouse. There she encounters other survivors, including Ben who also seeks shelter in that house. Barbara gets in a catatonic shock, while Ben must fight of zombies with a torch as it seems fire is their weakness. Then they discover Harry and his wife Helen, who is hiding in the basement with their injured daughter. Several people have decided to seek shelter in the farmhouse, but will they be able to keep the zombies out?
The film was animated by Demente Animation Studio, and on their website it’s clearly listed that this movie was made on a limited budget. And it shows. The animation leaves a lot to be desired, and while it’s made in the traditional and quite time-consuming 2D animation style the movie suffers a bit from not having had a considerably bigger budget to flesh out the animation a lot more. There’s no doubt that the animators had to prioritize certain scenes over the overall product, pretty much like many of the old cartoons where the majority of an episode had very limited animation and movement while action and fight scenes looked nice (most of which were often used in the opening intros of the series, so you literally watched the best parts while listening to the theme songs). It’s obvious that the limited budget put a lot of restraints of how well this could be made, and the final product suffers from it. That being said, there are some decent scenes and particularly the gory ones are pretty good.
Overall, Night of the Animated Dead is more a movie you watch mostly for curiosity’s sake, as unfortunately it feels kind of redundant since it basically just retells the original story. Perhaps it would have been far more interesting if it was made in a completely different way to the original, maybe playing a lot more on the gore scenes because those were definitely the movie’s highlights. An interesting watch overall, but Jason Axinn’s previous film To Your Last Death is far superior compared to this one.
The movie is distributed by Warner Bros, and was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2021. It is also widely available on several streaming sites.
Director: Jason Axinn
Writers: George A. Romero, John A. Russo (based on their original script)
Country & year: USA, 2021
Voice actors: Josh Duhamel, Dulé Hill, Katharine Isabelle, James Roday Rodriguez, Katee Sackhoff, Will Sasso, Jimmi Simpson, Nancy Travis, Stefan Marks, William Calvert, Chris Edgerly
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14961110/
