To Your Last Death‘s Jason Axinn is the director of the new take on George A. Romero’s classic movie Night of the Living Dead. Describing Night of the Animated Dead as “a fast paced rollercoaster ride of violence”, he chatted with Paul Simpson about the movie…

 We’ve had the original Romero which is a classic we all grew up with, we’ve had the Tom Savini version with Pat Tallman which brought colour and gore. What is this new version bringing that’s new to the table?

The new version of the film is animated so it allows us a bigger canvas to do some stuff with gore and violence that we were previously unable to do in any other earlier version of the film. Also we have an extra scene that’s sort of a monologue in the original movie but we actually get to see that scene in the current version. The ending is fleshed out a little bit more.

At times it almost felt like you’d rotoscoped the original, the set ups and everything were so similar, so what was the animation process?

Well thank you for saying that, we worked really hard to make the film look very much like the original movie. The idea was, we wanted to  remake the original film and have this be a remake of the classic but then to add in a lot more gore and violence wherever we could and also to speed up the pacing a little bit for modern audiences.

The running time’s considerably shorter: was that just the way that it came out during production or was there a conscious decision to compress it?

I would say that originally the film was a little bit longer but as production went on, it just made sense that some of the scenes would benefit from slightly faster pacing, which is a normal thing that happens during film production. If there’s something from the original film that you don’t see here, we probably animated it and have it, but we chose to edit it so we would have a faster paced film.

I know that over here they’ve started animating some of the old lost Doctor Who serials from the 60s, using the soundtracks that they have. One of the issues that they’ve talked about is that obviously, in animation, you can’t have a moment of stillness anywhere near as easily as you can with live action. Were there moments where you looked at it and went, ‘Well, actually nothing is happening here? So we can cut that moment out’?

That’s a really interesting question. Yes, it’s funny, if you ever do have that happen, it just looks like you’ve paused the movie and so it’s really important to have something moving. The way you counteract that sometimes is have a character in the background shift slightly or someone just moves their arm. There’s something to let the audience know there’s still movement going on but you can still have a quiet moment. The rules of live action and animation are really different when it comes to pacing and when it comes to long quiet moments.

Are there moments where you were going ‘Oh, I wish I was doing this live action’ because you could express it better in that than animation? And vice versa, were there some moments where you thought ‘This, we can actually do.’ such as the monologue for instance.

Yes, definitely. The monologue was a great place to show something that we’d never seen before in the original film or any of the remakes since then.

In terms of ‘Do I wish I was doing something live action?’ There’s that one shot in the film, it’s a long fight shot with Ben fighting a bunch of zombies, that was a lot of fun to animate but I always do wonder what it would look like if it had been a live action… like an Oldboy or John Wick kind of sequence with zombies.

What was the biggest challenge for you in terms of the presentation of it and the preparation?

The biggest challenge of this film was getting the production done during the pandemic because we had prepped the film but the pandemic happened right at the beginning of animation. Instead of us all being in the same place in one office or one building, creatively working through different aspects of production, everyone was working from their homes and it took a while to adjust to that reality and continue on.

Obviously there’s the old saw that if life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Were there unexpected benefits that came from the fact you were more remote on the working?

The unexpected benefit of making this film during the pandemic was that real life was very very much like this film. I was trapped in my apartment, surrounded by people outside that theoretically could kill me, for over a year. So it was really easy to connect with the emotional vibe of the characters in the movie because it felt like, at some level, I was living that life.

Had you got the recording done before Covid?

Yes, we were very lucky. We had finished all the voice stuff about a month or two before Covid happened.

Did you have to do any pick ups on it? Presumably, so many people had home studios set up by six months in or did you stick with what you had?

We didn’t have to re-record any of the actors. We did all our sound design, music and colour grading set up in people’s homes. So it wasn’t that much of a problem but we didn’t have to re-record any of the actors.

What have you learned as an animation director from working on this where it’s based on an original but also has to be its own thing?

It’s a tough line to wall to make a remake of something but also leave your imprint on it. So the way I did it was, I tried to imagine if George Romero was making this film and he could upgrade the gore to whatever he wanted it to be, based on his other films, what kind of gore would he put into this film now?

That was a learning process for me on the film, to try to extrapolate that. It was a lot of fun to do that and I’m happy with all the stuff we came up with.

Night of the Animated Dead is out now on digital, Blu-ray and DVD.