Studio: Madhouse
Director: Yasuhiro Aoki
Writer: David S. Goyer
Wha’ happen’?
Batman gets called in by Jim Gordon after an entire congregation in a cathedral goes nuts and a cardinal named O’Fallon is apparently abducted by a hulking reptilian man. Batman descends into the sewers to find O’Fallon while keeping in radio contact with Gordon. Gordon tells Batman that the lizard man is Waylon “Killer Croc” Jones who was a patient of Doctor Crane in Arkham. During that time, Crane apparently amplified Croc’s fears to psychotic levels, including his phobia of bats…
Batman is bitten by Croc which infects him with fear toxin but he’s able to beat Croc and proceeds into the sewers where Crane is putting O’Fallon on trial for the crime of giving the homeless of Gotham hope. Batman fights off Crane’s army of mind-controlled hobos, blows a hole in the room by igniting the methane in the atmosphere (don’t think about it too hard) and brings O’Fallon back to the surface.
How was it?
First things first, this feels like Batman in a way that none of the other shorts have so far (Crossfire came closest but Batman is practically a cameo in that). This opens with a dark rainy night in Gotham with the Bat Signal strobing the sky and police sirens wailing like wolves. A gargoyle stirs on a rooftop and is revealed to be Batman, who then dives into the streets below like a vengeful creature of the night.
It’s peak Batman.
And, after three episodes of tackling generic mobsters and one-off supervillains we finally get to see some honest to God FREAKS, with two pretty major rogues appearing.
So, probably the strongest of the shorts we’ve seen so far but I still have issues. For one the animation isn’t great. Characters have tendency to go off model and the mouth animations are really quite ugly and distracting.
Also, the short brings back the weird as hell idea of Batman moving like a smoke monster from Have I got A Story for You. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a visual representation as to how other people see him move, or if it’s just a stylistic choice or whether this Batman is actually supposed to have super powers but whatever it is it’s distracting as hell and I don’t like it.
There’s also (I feel like this is becoming this Shortstember’s unofficial motto) some real some dumb shit here. Batman explores an underground railway that was apparently built in Gotham to transport dead bodies to the city’s various cemeteries. Like…why would you need that? How many people are dying in this city every day that would justify the expense of industrial scale corpse transportation? Is this Gotham or the fucking 40k universe?
And there’s also this little gem of dialogue…
BATMAN: I’ll keep in contact with this. It’s a wireless relay system. Slaved to the communicator in my mask. In case you’re tempted to try and track me with it, don’t bother. Signal are locked with quantum crytology bounced through a dozen satellites. You’ll never be able to follow it.
unshavedmouse 
So fun fact, underground railways for cemeteries are an actual genuine thing that happened.
I’d have to check if New York ever had one, but the London Necropolis Railway operated from 1854 all the way until 1941. Most of it was borrowing from other lines, but it did have some stretches of dedicated track built for it.
The essential point is that they’d opened a massive new cemetery at Brookwood- 23 miles outside the city so it would be comfortably outside the forecast growth of London, which meant you needed some way of transporting both the coffins and the mourners out there, and the company who owned the cemetery hoped that having a fancy dedicated railway with all the funeral bells and whistles would mean they’d get a monopoly on all the burials in London for the next few centuries.
It wasn’t ever as successful as planned (burials were about 2,300 a year rather than the estimated 50-100,000) because… well people liked the idea of being able to visit their dead relatives graves *without* travelling 23 miles to do so. Despite this, it only closed because a German bomb scored a direct hit on the London termimal.
Whaaa? That is crazy!
Clearly proper Gotham, then.
That’s some cool, Halloween season appropriate history, right there!
Okay, but that Croc looks FUCKING AWESOME. Freaky and bizarre and very, very deadly.
Pretty surprising to me that the animation isn’t up to snuff because Madhouse usually does amazing work. They animated all four of Satoshi Kon’s films (Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika) all of which have phenomenal animation.
I get the feeling it might have been a rush job.
Batman: Signal are locked with quantum crytology bounced through a dozen satellites. You’ll never be able to follow it.
Gordon: What is this? Star Trek?
Awesome looking Croc, but I can’t shake how weird it is that these shorts allegedly take place in the universe of the Nolan films.
Just can’t picture the (somewhat) more grounded and realistic Dark Knight Batman facing a giant crocodile man.
I mean, Bane us basically a cyborg
Kinda, yeah.
Not if he’s an actual mutant, but if he were a large & scary man with body modification as extensive as the ‘Cat Man’ being observed through a haze of Fear Gas …
Every time I see Goyer wrote something good I am disappointed that so much of the fanbase hates him now. The man co-wrote my second favorite comic book storyline and did so much good for DC, and I so often hear the internet talk like he is the worst writer in history since Batman V. Superman.