Imagine if Gremlins had a baby with The Walking Dead and raised it on a steady diet of Canadian weirdness like The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. That's the kind of delightful insanity to expect from the Canadian animated film Night of the Zoopocalypse, a family-friendly horror-comedy that's going to leave audiences cackling and slightly terrified all at once.

Things are about to get a whole lot stranger — and goopier — in the Great White North, as the film, which opens in theatres today, unleashes a horde of undead animals with a penchant for limb-swapping and butt jokes. As directors Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro join CBC Arts for a video interview, it's clear that their own dark sense of humour is stamped on every aspect of this film.

From the early days of the National Film Board to the modern successes of studios like House of Cool, which Curtis co-founded, Canada has consistently punched above its weight in the world of animation. While Curtis's Toronto-based studio is known for its collaborative work on hits like The Book of Life, Rio, Ice Age and Despicable Me, it's never made its own movie — until now.

"Making movies is really hard," says Curtis. "We were very happy working on some really fantastic films over the 20 years of the studio, but we also definitely wanted to make something on our own."

That opportunity arose with horror legend Clive Barker's idea for a graphic novel about a zombie virus spreading in a zoo. The writer allowed producer Steve Hoban to transform the premise into an unexpected concept: a family film told from the point of view of the animals dealing with a zombie-like virus. "You know, the Hellraisers and Candyman guy? And I wanna make a family film," Curtis recalls Hoban saying.

To bring this gunky, gross-out vision to life, Curtis brought in Mexican Canadian director Perez-Castro, who's a fellow animation veteran with a deep love for the horror genre.

"I just love horror movies," Perez-Castro says. "So Ricardo was dangling this carrot, like, 'Come over here, and we'll play in the sandbox.' And zombie animals, like, of course. This is such a perfect, simple concept."

The challenge was blending horror tropes with a family-friendly tone. "I think we had a line which was that we can't do gore," Perez-Castro explains. However, the team found creative solutions. "Just the fact that the movie is so stylized and the characters are so cartoony, you can get away with a lot of body horror tropes [such as] dropping limbs and heads rolling and things like that, because they're made out of gummy."

"I think that all the best zombie films always bring something new," Curtis adds. To stand out, they embraced a unique visual style, mixing and matching the parts and appendages of their zombie animals. "For us, it was really like little kids playing with our toys and just having a great time with our weird spooky toys," Perez-Castro says.

Paired with the creative team's offbeat touch, this playful approach emphasizes the film's independent spirit. "Any time you feel like, 'Oh, I can't believe they went there,' that was us," says Perez-Castro.

"We were a very small team of people making decisions. And I have to say, I think our producers were very supportive of every single kind of crazy thing that we were throwing at them. And they also had some great ideas as well. I think that we just didn't have that many chefs in the kitchen as it happens sometimes in the big animated studios — and we come from working with some of those big studio productions, so this was really our chance to just go wild and be free."

The co-directors wanted to infuse elements from classics like Gremlins, Ghostbusters and Labyrinth. They hope people will be talking about the film the same way Gremlins is referenced today.

The film's success, however, isn't solely reliant on the creative vision of its directors. The voice cast includes Stranger Things star David Harbour, Kim's Convenience lead Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, iconic Kids in the Hall member Scott Thompson and emerging talent Gabbi Kosmidis, who bring the characters to life with an energy that matches the film's offbeat tone.

"There's nothing without the script; everything comes from the writing," Thompson says in an interview. "They told me to sound mostly like myself, so I really did. I didn't have an accent or anything. I just made him [Ash the ostrich] a little more frantic, a little more hysterical, in a little higher register, and that's about it."

The film's Canadian roots are evident in its quirky sensibility. "Canadians have a really interesting way of seeing entertainment," Curtis believes, tracing the eccentricities back to the days of Mr. Dressup and The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. "We had all these kinds of weird things that could only be done in a place that is a little unregulated and you just make up weird, odd things."

Looking to the future, he hopes to see animation continue to break free from genre constraints. "Animation is not a genre. It's a medium. You can do whatever you want in animation, and it's only going to be independent productions, like ours, that'll be able to break animation out of this genre stage." He urges viewers to support independent animation "so we can have many more like this."

Thompson and Kosmidis also acknowledge the significant role Canada plays in the world of animation. "I think a lot of people don't realize how much animation is actually made in Canada," Kosmidis, who voiced Gracie the wolf, says. "It is massive. We have a huge market for it in terms of television, film, video games. There's a huge voice-over market here as well."

Thompson traces this legacy back to the NFB. "They made all these short films and they were all over the place. When I was young, we were always shown these animated films. There were people like Norman McLaren and these great Canadian animators. I think that's what set the tone and that's why there's this real tradition of animation. That comes from the National Film Board."

The comedian also expressed concern about the current state of the Canadian film industry — particularly in light of the "American-Canadian cold war" he perceives. "I hope that this allows Canada to wake up and go, 'You know what? We have neglected our industry. We've neglected this country. We've neglected the arts and we've neglected our artists.'""

He calls for a renewed commitment to support Canadian artists and the arts. "If we want them to stay and we want to have a real industry, then we better step up to the plate."

Perhaps Night of the Zoopocalypse will encourage more of the country's filmmakers to let their imaginations run wild, knowing Canada can be a home for the weird and the whimsical.