To Your Last Death Director Jason Axinn On Making the Animated Horror Film – CBR – Comic Book Resources

In today's uncertain times, it's nice to escape into a movie. And just in time for St. Patricks Day, director Jason Axinns animated horror mind-trip, To Your Last Death, featuring the vocal talents of William Shatner, Morena Baccarin and Ray Wise, is available on digital and video on demand. To Your Last Death has the distinction of being the first 2D-animated horror film. And horror aficionados agree its a good one too. The film has been honored with numerous awards at horror film festivals. And now its available to an even wider audience.

In an interview, Axinn, who is making his feature directorial debut with To Your Last Death, spoke to CBR about the long process of animating the film, adding humor to the horror and how the movies big-name voice cast came on board.

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CBR: Why did you decide to make To Your Last Death an animated feature?

Jason Axinn: Well, originally it was written as a live-action feature, but we thought that maybe animation would be a much more interesting way to tell the story. And there's a lot of things you can do in... animation that are unique to the medium, and we tried to showcase a bunch of those throughout the movie. Its like an exciting version of a live-action movie.

Can you elaborate on what opportunities animation opens up that wouldnt have been possible in live-action?

Mostly... in how you present the character. How youd point the camera at a scene, or how you show things with color, or transitions. The film I would say [was] the most influential on [To Your Last Death] would be Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in terms of how that tells a story. And so we pushed a little bit beyond what live-action would do in certain places because, with animation, you're given a lot of leeway, so you can do different things with transitions, with color, with performances. How big and how campy you can get with a performance, in a live-action movie might be a little ridiculous, but in an animated movie it seems to fit just fine.

Speaking of influences, I noticed that between William Shatners narration and the nature of the story, the film was somewhat reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. Was that an influence at all?

I dont know if The Twilight Zone specifically [was an influence overall], but Mr. Shatner, we definitely told him to play the role as if he was a modern-day version of [The Twilight Zone creator and narrator] Rod Serling. Thats definitely coming through.

What about the style of animation? I thought it was a very unique, sort of Archer-esque style.

Theres a show that was on Adult Swim for a while called Metalocalypse. It's about... the most famous band in the world, a death-metal band, and in every episode lots of people die because they're fans. It's like a crazy fun, super violent, amazing show. And the two things we aimed at while making the movie were we wanted it to look and feel like Archer, and to look and feel like Metalocalypse. So the movie would be a mixture of those two things. But Archer was definitely a huge influence. We love the show, we love the art style. We didn't want to like be exactly them, [but] we wanted to be in that direction.

Was there a specific challenge creating the animation in that way?

Because we were an independent film with a budget not as high as something like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, we had to work with animators that were all over the world. And so we had people from 16, 18 different countries -- Brazil, England, Iran, Poland, Russia, all over the place. And the hard part was trying to get the animation to have a continuity to it, for the art and the animation to feel like it was all from the same place, even though our staff was all over the world.

That sounds like it was an incredible organizational task.

It was. One crazy story I can tell you is that... Iran turned off the internet for a month at some point, and we had to stop production waiting for [the animator that lived in Iran while he waited for the country] to turn the internet back on so he could send us his work. So you know, you're sort of at the mercy of the internet and what a country will do for that. [But] he was such a great animator it was worth it. He did a great job.

You also have some amazing voice talent in this movie. What was the story behind William Shatners involvement?

The people that wrote the film, Jim [Cirile] and Tonya [Klein], who are also the executive producers, one of William Shatners children was... someone they knew [so] Jim and Tanya sent the script to Mr. Shatner and Shatner liked it, and he said, "yes." We got him because he liked the script.

We pretty much got everybody that way because the script was interesting and unique and crazy. And people really responded to the material.

I thought it was a very interesting story, because obviously, there are the genre elements, but there's also the theme of who we think we are and how we respond to extreme circumstances that flips the story on its head. How did you balance all of the different elements of the movie?

The people that wrote the script wrote a great script, and so a lot of that hard work, that was done already. But the actors really gave these fantastic, nuanced performances. And sometimes they're all in the room with each other, and sometimes they're people that never met each other who are having arguments or conversations. So we got lucky with this really great cast, who [incorporated] an amazing level of nuance. And so for me, it wasn't that hard to just kind of pick the right take or move the right moment in the right place to make it all lock in.

The movie is actually quite funny too. There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor. Was that something that you purposely were trying to bring out?

I come from a background of comedy. I did a ton of sketch-comedy and then some web series and commercial stuff. So [the humor in the movies] generally my sense of humor. I don't want to ruin any jokes in the movie, but there's definitely places where there are specific jokes that are definitely me adding a moment or a joke in the movie that's just my sense of humor that wasn't there originally. But also Jim and Tanya wrote in jokes in different places. But I definitely added in moments here and there that are slightly ridiculous..

How did you decide on the level of gore and how graphic to make the movie? There are moments where it gets very graphic and then there are also moments where you hold back.

Some of it was just: what can we afford to do? Otherwise, I would say we treated every torture scene or death scene as its own individual thing. And it's whatever was appropriate per scene. Although, its funny, while making it -- because it took a long time to do that -- I became so desensitized to any aspect of it being [cringe-inducing]. There's parts where people gasp or cringe or something's very violent, and for me, I'm just so used to seeing it so many times, that I'd forgotten that it's something that would even get that reaction from somebody. I'm just more focused on like, "Oh, is that color right? Is the timing right? Is the sound effect right?"

So, for me when I finally saw the film with a big audience and people reacted all the way through the movie, that was the first time I realized just how violent and gory it really was. So I'm happy I didn't go further I'm happy with how it is now, it was amazing how you can experience it for real for the first time with an audience, how different that is from just the physical act of making it.

The movies been on the horror awards circuit and done quite well.

Yeah, at this moment I think were at 21 awards.

What was the experience of being on the festival circuit like?

I wasn't able to attend a lot of the festival shows because they were all over the country and then some were in other countries like Brazil and Canada and France. So I've been to two or three screenings. And it's always amazing to watch [the movie] with an audience, an audience always reacts differently than you think they will. There's definitely moments in the film that I thought, "This will get a laugh or this will get a reaction," and then there's like five other things that do, and I'm surprised by that. I always asked about, "Why did you find this part funny?"But people do....

The awards are great. It's really nice to get awards. I'm really happy with it. One of the awards [the movie] won, which is crazy, is... for Best Cinematography. And we were up against four other films that were live-action. So the film To Your Last Death, the only cameras in the film are the [digital application] After Effects cameras, meaning there are no cameras. So our film beat four other movies that had Directors of Photography and cameras, we beat them for Best Cinematography.

That must be rewarding.

It was a huge honor. Were thrilled that we got recognized for that. Thats something that normally animation doesnt really get a lot of attention for. So were really happy about that.

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Now what about the future? Are you planning on doing more horror, more animated movies?

I am currently directing my second [feature] film right now. I'm actually at work right now.

Can you tease anything about what the new movie is?

I can tell you very little, but here's what I can say: It's another animated horror film, and it's for a studio, and it'll come out, I believe, in 2021.

To Your Last Death, directed by Jason Axinn and written by Tanya Kline and Jim Cirile, stars Morena Baccarin, Ray Wise, Dani Lennon, Bill Moseley and William Shatner. The film is now available on digital and VOD.

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Freelance writer and pop culture enthusiast living in Los Angeles. Co-author of the books Mad Men Unzipped and the recently released Finding Truth in Fiction, about audience's positive responses to fictional stories.

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To Your Last Death Director Jason Axinn On Making the Animated Horror Film - CBR - Comic Book Resources