Thanks to a quirk of copyright law that has left George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead in the public domain the film has become one of the more tinkered with pictures out there, with fans adding color, additional dimensions, producing mash ups, etc - and all of it well with the bounds of legal use. And coming soon is the latest in such experimentation - a mass animated version of the film with scores of animators from around the globe each contributing brief segments animated in wildly diverse styles.
Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated takes all of those clips in all of those styles and masshes them together into one wildly diverse new version of the film - one that includes all of the content of the original but presented in styles ranging from sock puppets to pencil drawings to 3D CGI. IT's kind of dizzying to think about but for those hungry for a taste we've got an exclusive first look at the new trailer for the project included below.
Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated takes all of those clips in all of those styles and masshes them together into one wildly diverse new version of the film - one that includes all of the content of the original but presented in styles ranging from sock puppets to pencil drawings to 3D CGI. IT's kind of dizzying to think about but for those hungry for a taste we've got an exclusive first look at the new trailer for the project included below.
I sort of wish that this was done with a single animation style, as I imagine the aggressive change-ups in style will be very, very distracting in the film. As it is, this is the type of thing that belongs more on HD-YouTube than in Cinemas or on DVD.
But with a single creative vision guiding it and more restrained approach, this may have been transcendent.
Having seen this at the Revenant film fest in Seattle this last year, I found the concept to be much better than the execution. It's not that it's distracting, there is a lot of dead space (pun intended) with in the film to fill up, hence, fill it with interesting versions and takes on original film. What I found that didn't work, was the lack of talent involved. there was a handful of really good types of style and designs, but the majority was cluttered up with really bad, even horrible art works that just made the experience tedious, cheap and ugly. Scribbled messes, vague moving shapes, photo-shop filters, etc. While some of the animated things, sock puppets, cgi and such soar above the pack. I think a better job of editing, in which I mean, selecting the styles involved would have lead to a better and more interesting result. As it stands it's clunky and quirky.