Your Daily Dracula – Nosferatu Re-Animated (2018)
A feature-length rotoscoped animation, colouring in a slightly truncated print of Murnau’s 1922 film. So much has been done to and with the original film that this risks being just one more gloss on Nosferatu, which has inspired a ton of animations already (check out the toon section of the YDD archive) to the point where Max Schreck’s ratty presence even fits into the Spongebob universe. This omits any intertitles, but uses some letters, diary entries and extracts from an All About Vampires book ascribed to Abraham Van Helsing to fill in a few plot points you might miss. The presumption is that you know the story already and it’s easy to follow without the dialogue titles or bits of poetic narrative, though I miss some of the odd asides of the original. Director-writer Fran Blackwood – who might not fully earn either title, but contributes one of the best accompaniment-to-Nosferatu scores I’ve heard – oddly mixes names from Bram Stoker and Henrik Galeen, so Galeen’s Hutter is ‘Jonathan’ and is married to Nina … the Van Helsing who wrote the book isn’t the professor played by John Gottowt (who was Bulwer in the original) … and Orlok is Orlock. The process of drawing over and colouring in the film makes for blocky, bright, pudgy, wavery characters – Jonathan has custard-yellow hair and characters’ clothes are considerably more colourful than in any tinted Nosferatu I’ve seen … even Orlock looks soft and unthreatening. The end credits include inset unaltered snippets of the original, which might not be the best idea – offering a reminder of just how startling those images remain without the layers of crayon over them or that the expressive faces of silent screen actors could convey a great deal which gets lost in this. It’s a cute endeavour and not without merit, but I’m not sure that cute is what you want when dealing with Nosferatu.
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