What The Midnight Gospel and Shrek Retold Share in Common
By: Henry Fairbanks
Tags: Art History, Art, The Midnight Gospel, Internet Culture, Shrek

History of Reanimateds

To find the origins of the Reanimated movement, it was clear I had to look on NewGrounds. For the uninitiated, NewGrounds was the hub for animations, games, and art made in Adobe Flash back in the mid to late 2000s. Back in the day, most of their artists were teenagers who just made dumb stuff for fun, but the site would evolve into an incubator for some of the most revered web animators today.

But the origins of this movement go back to the early days of NewGrounds when low production values were the norm. Nearly all of these artists had no formal training or education on copyright law, and thus had no aversion to remixing other’s work. The earliest Reanimated I could find was “Falcon Punch Re-Animated” by UberCream and Indbro.

Only a few months later would the first Reanimated podcast be uploaded to NewGrounds, “Dv — Train Tracks” by LazyMuffin on NewGrounds from Jan. 1, 2009, which animated a clip from the Distortedview podcast.

Eventually, some of the more popular animators on NewGrounds would move to YouTube to expand their audience and turn what was just a hobby into a full-time job with YouTube’s advertising programs. Many of these animators saw success on the new platform including Egoraptor, RubberRoss, PhsycicPebbles, etc. However, soon the landscape of YouTube would shift, leaving no room for short videos that took months to complete. The name of the game was +10min videos published at least weekly. The old NewGrounds animators reacted in different ways to this. Some went into traditional media, others started “let’s play” channels, a style of video where a host plays video games and makes entertaining commentary on what’s happening.

Egoraptor, aka Arin Hanson, created a let’s play channel with co-host Jon Jafari, later replaced by Dan Avidan, called Game Grumps. After creating a few Reanimateds himself for the channel, fans of the show started creating Reanimateds themselves. Egoraptor began paying artists for the rights to their Reanimateds using his larger audience to get better monetization from the video, allowing him to pay the artist more than if they posted it on their small channel. For a long time, Game Grumps Animated was the source of some of the most creative animation on the platform.

Over time, people got more ambitious with Reanimateds and began to collaborate with other animators to create unique retellings for their favorite stories. Unlike “Dv — Train Tracks” which was a collaboration between a few friends, Reanimateds would become huge community-driven collaborations with hundreds of contributing artists. “The Mama Luigi Project” from 2017 had over 227 contributing artists and reanimated an entire episode of the “Super Mario World” TV show.

On Nov. 29, 2018, 3GI released Shrek Retold which — while using original audio and some artists who chose to use live-action footage to retell their segments — is a feature-length Reanimated of the entire Shrek movie. There’s even an all new scene in the Reanimated version that wasn’t present in the original. It’s a trippy retelling of Shrek’s tale best watched with friends. It should not be judged by the standards of traditional American cinema, as it is not a product of traditional American cinema. In my mind, it’s the pinnacle of the Reanimated movement.