Summary

• Scooby-Doo On Zombie Island is the franchise's best movie, featuring captivating storytelling and a memorable voice cast.
• The animation in Zombie Island is breathtaking and ahead of its time, setting a high standard for future Scooby-Doo adaptations.
• Despite attempts to reinvent the visual style, returning to the Zombie Island animation could solve some of the franchise's modern flaws.

Although it’s James Gunn’s cinematic adaptations that most audiences first associate with Scooby-Doo on the big screen, the best version was actually released several years prior. best Scooby-Doo movie to date.

There have been several different iterations of Scooby-Doo on television and film, and each new version brings a unique animation (or live-action) style that effectively keeps pushing the franchise into the future. It’s one of the longest-running cartoons despite switching up its style every few years, and each iteration continues to push boundaries. However, it turns out that Scooby-Doo had already mastered the formula 26 years ago, with the strongest combination of animation and storytelling that it’s ever achieved.

Scooby-Doo On Zombie Island Is The Franchise’s Best Movie (By Far)

None Of The Others Have Managed To Reach The Same Heights

Despite the charm and nostalgia that makes James Gunn’s Scooby-Doo movies so popular, this animated adventure is truly the pinnacle of the franchise. It features everything that makes Scooby-Doo so popular: the jokes are funny and plentiful, the character dynamics are compelling, and the mystery at the heart of the story is genuinely interesting and difficult to solve. Particularly in the serialized format, Scooby-Doo can often struggle from being too predictable and formulaic - but this movie completely dismisses those criticisms with a complex, intriguing story.

Scooby-Doo On Zombie Island was the first direct-to-video movie in the franchise.

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island also features one of the best voice casts in the franchise’s history. Alongside the regular voices of the Mystery Incorporated gang, the movie also features vocal performances from Mark Hamill as Snakebite Scruggs, Jim Cummings as Jacques, and Tara Strong as Lena Dupree. This makes for one of the strongest ing casts in Scooby-Doo history, with each actor bringing something unique to their character that makes them memorable and enhances this movie’s plot. Scooby-Doo villains can sometimes be forgettable, but Zombie Island ensures that criticism is never raised.

Scooby-Doo On Zombie Island’s Animation Was Breathtaking

The Visual Style Was Way Ahead Of Its Time

In addition to the exceptional voice cast and complex storytelling, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island also features some hugely creative visuals that outshine almost everything else in the franchise. Like most of the Scooby-Doo adaptations, Zombie Island adopts a completely new animation style in order to distinguish itself from the others, and that immediately proves to be a great decision. From a technical standpoint, Zombie Island is arguably the most well-constructed film in the series - the level of detail on display in every single shot is overwhelming, adding to the factor of rewatchability that’s so important with family cartoons.

Although Netflix’s Scooby-Doo adaptation is going down the live-action route, the varying animation styles have always been one of the series’ most impressive features. The way that this story has survived through countless different visual forms is unmatched, and every so often, the creators stumble across a style that blends perfectly with the narrative they’re trying to tell. That’s exactly what happened with Zombie Island, and it’s rarely been replicated since then.

I Wish Scooby-Doo Movies All Looked As Good As Zombie Island

It Would Solve Many Of The Movies' Flaws

While Scooby-Doo has proven to have a certain level of longevity when it comes to the TV shows and movies, they’re not all as beautiful and technically proficient as Zombie Island. In fact, there was even a modern sequel to this story named Return to Zombie Island, but it failed to live up to expectations - and the change in visual style was most likely the biggest reason for that. The animators really struck gold with the original, and there’s an argument to be made that they simply should have stuck with that style in the years afterward.

Scooby-Doo is always trying to reinvent its visuals, but the franchise would possibly have found more success in the modern era if it had simply replicated the Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island style that was so popular. There’s a level of nostalgia associated with the movie that the animators easily could have capitalized on, but instead, the series has refused to stick to one particular visual medium. There are advantages to this decision - namely, every project looks different and it never feels repetitive - but it also means that only some of the Scooby-Doo movies replicate that same magic.