(2000s)

Gotham Knight: Field Test

Studio: Bee Train

Director: Hiroshi Morioka

Writer: Jordan Goldberg

Wha’ happen’?

In the aftermath of the shoot-out between Maroni and the Russian, both mob bosses are now hiding from each other on two coincidentally identical yachts in the harbour.

Bruce Wayne visits Lucius Fox who’s been using the Wayne Industries satellite to spy on the yachts in the harbour without even knowing why his employer wants him to do that.

He also shows Bruce a new machine he’s been working on that generates a forcefield when it detects the sound of a gunshot.

Bruce attends a charity golf tournament held by a shady real estate developer who’s been linked to the death of a community activist. Later that night, he pays a visit to the docks as Batman and pilots Maroni’s boat into the Russian’s. In the middle of the ensuing gunfight, he captures both bosses and gets them to agree to a truce until he can get solid evidence on them. But one of the Russian’s younger hoods tries to shoot Batman which activates the forcefield and he gets hit by the ricochet.

Batman races the kid to a hospital in the Batmobile but when he tries to hand him off to some cops, the kid pulls a gun on them because the WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE forgot he had a gun EVEN AFTER HE ALREADY TRIED TO SHOOT HIM.

Anyway, the kid surrenders and throws the gun down a drain and is taken into custody.

And Bruce returns the forcefield generator to Lucius and says that he’s willing to risk his life, but not the lives of others.

How was it?

Okay, let’s get the extremely bishy elephant in the room out of the way.

That design is honestly a little too pretty for Dick Grayson. Kevin Conroy really leans into it too, I don’t think he’s ever pitched Bruce’s voice as high as he does here.

That aside, the animation in this is probably the strongest of the three we’ve seen so far and if you can get past the fact that Bruce Wayne looks like he belongs on the cover of Tiger Beat and Batman looks like…

…he belongs on the cover of Tiger Beat if they catered to the BDSM crowd it looks pretty good.

The final note where Bruce gives up the device because he won’t risk the lives of others in his war is a very good, very “Batman” character moment.

However, I am irrationally angry that this short depicts Bruce Wayne, the ultimate WASP blue blood, cheating at golf.

Honestly, better that Thomas and Martha died rather than live to see such a thing.

There is also a lot of dumb, dumb shit in this. The fact that Bruce doesn’t disarm the kid before putting him in the Batmobile is such a head-slapper. Like, fine, I probably would have been too panicked and flustered to think of it but I’m not Batman.

But what really cheeses me off is the sheer idiocy of the whole object this short is based on.

A forcefield that activates on the sound of a gunshot would be real nifty if it wasn’t for the fact that a gunshot is actually a little sonic boom because bullets travel faster than the speed of sound.

Well, to be fair. It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect a weapons designer to know.

Gotham Knight: Crossfire

Studio: Production IG

Director: Futoshi Higashide

Writer: Greg Rucka

Wha’ happen’?

We’re introduced to two cops from Gotham’s Major Crimes Unit (MCU), Crispus Allen and Anna Ramirez who’re tasked by Lieutenant Gordon to escort Jacob Feely (the jetpack man from the first short) back to Arkham Asylum.

Since the events of Batman Begins the Narrows have basically been cordoned off from the rest of the city and turned into a big open prison/lunatic asylum Arkham City style. On the journey over Allen and Ramirez argue over whether Batman is a good thing for the city. Crispus, who’s new to Gotham, argues that the police shouldn’t be collaborating with a vigilante but Ramirez, who’s lived in the city her whole life, says that Batman has saved Gotham and made it a safe place for honest cops.

Ah yes. Good old straight-as-a-die-Ramirez. Honest Anna. You sure can trust *her* with your wife and kids.

They leave Feely back in Arkham without incident and Allen says that he’s leaving the MCU as he’s heard it’s going to peak after Phase 3, I mean, he doesn’t agree with the unit being Batman’s errand boy. Ramirez pulls over to give him a lecture and accidentally ends up in the crossfire…

…between Sal Maroni and another gangster called The Russian. Batman arrives and saves them and Allen learns a valuable lesson about questioning the wisdom of unaccountable vigilantes.

How was it?

Much better. Not great but better.

Firstly, the positives. This short absolutely oozes atmosphere and the music and visuals work well to create a real sense of menace as the cops get closer to Arkham. The script also comes from comics veteran Greg Rucka and feels more authentically Batman than the previous short. Lastly, this:

YES. THAT is how I want animé Batman to look.

As for the flaws, well…the animation is a little ropey at times (I swear one side of Ramirez’s face is larger that the other) and it’s a little insubstantial. I’d have liked Allen’s concerns to have been given a bit more weight and respect. I mean, obviously time is sparse but I’d still have liked to see at least a nod in that direction.

It’s cool that we get these little connective moments between the shorts, but Feely is a completely different character that he was in Have I Got A Story For You?

I suppose my biggest gripe is that, if the purpose of this anthology is to lay the groundwork for Dark Knight, I’d honestly be more confused than anything. I’m not sure if The Russian is supposed to be the same character as The Chechen from DK and I may not not much but I know this:

That don’t look like no Eric Roberts I ever saw. Ah well, maybe he dan’t been cast yet.

Anyway, definite step up.

Gotham Knight: Have I Got a Story for You

Studio: Studio 4°C

Director: Shōjirō Nishimi

Writer: Josh Olsen

Wha’ happen’?

Four kids meet up in a skate park and three of them tell stories about encountering Batman that day fighting a masked man with a jetpack. The three stories all describe very different depictions of Batman; as a shadowy monster, a human/bat hybrid and lastly a high-tech robot. Then, the real Batman bursts
into the skate park chasing the jet pack man and the fourth kid is able to save Batman by clocking the dude on the head with his skateboard.

How was it?

It sucks.

Torchesandaardvarks noted in the comments that Gotham Knight is just worse versions of Batman the Animated Series episodes. I don’t know about that, yet, but it’s definitely fair for the opener. Have I Got a Story For You is a direct lift from Legends of the Dark Knight, an episode from The New Batman Adventures that was itself an adaptation of The Batman Nobody Knows from the seventies. Gonna steal, steal from the best, I guess, but the problem is that Legends of the Dark Knight was a glorious celebration of multiple eras of Batman’s history with the production team going to insane lengths to mimic the style of Dick Sprang and Frank Miller. The message of that episode (outside of a mean and low-key homophobic jab at Joel Schumacher) is that Batman is vast, contains multitudes and that every
interpretation and version is wonderful. But Have I Got a Story For You isn’t an examination of who Batman is or what he means to people. It’s really ust about…how he looks. One kid thinks he looks like a shadow monster, one kid thinks he looks like a bat monster. Okay. And?

It also kind of breaks credibility that these kids were that close to Batman in broad daylight and couldn’t see that he is, in fact, a man in a bat costume. One kid claims to see Batman just emerging from the ground like liquid shadow. What’s the rational real world explanation for that other than the kid being high on mescalin?

Plus, when we finally see this terrifying figure of the night?

He looks like a Dad at a baseball game who got heatstroke.

So yeah.

Off to a bad start.

How do you fuck up animé Batman, and shall they do it again?

Shortstember 2023: Batman: Gotham Knight

“Man, Mouse sure has been pumping out those Batman reviews this year.”

“Da. No doubt because he is supporting the Hollywood Strikers by refusing to review any Marvel or Disney films until the strike ends.”

Firstly, holy shit, Comrade Crow’s still alive.

Secondly, yeah, while that was totally my reason for focusing so heavily on Batman movies this year I swear, it was also because I wanted to finish Batman Begins so that this year’s Shortstember wouldn’t occur out of series chronology because OCD be a harsh mistress.

So, what’s on the menu this year, Mouse, you ask?

GOTHAM KNIGHT.

NO.

The other one.

NOOOOOOO. THE OTHER ONE.

Gotham Knight is a 2008 anthology film that takes places in the continuity of the Nolanverse between Batman Begins and Dark Knight. It’s a collection of animé shorts produced by different animé studios to whet fan appetite before the sequel to a popular movie comes out. You know, a bit like the Animatrix. Wait, no. That’s unfair. It’s exactly like The Animatrix.

Look, it’s animé Batman directed with Kevin Conroy. If your pants aren’t already on the floor, why are you even reading this blog?

“Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.

This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.

“Coolio as Scarecrow! Ghost Joker! MADONNA AS HARLEY QUINN!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.

But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.

It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?

Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.

All kidding aside, I’ve seen nine of this legend’s movies and five of them are on my all time greatest list.*

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Summer Wars (2009)

So, here’s a little interesting factoid about me. If you ever meet someone from Ireland with the surname “Sharpson”, they are related to me. Like, immediately related. There are, at the time of writing, eight Sharpsons in the entire country. When I was growing up, there was my Dad, my three brothers, and me (my mother being a strong independent woman who refused to change her maiden name even for the sake of boosting the stats). That was it. My grandfather emigrated to Britain from Cyprus and then moved to Ireland in the fifties.

And, along the way, he anglicised his name to Sharpson, a name that had never existed in the country before then. So, we’re what you might call a rare breed.

Now, contrast that with my wife, whose family is as old as the hills, vast as the oceans and ~~mad as~~ lovely, lovely people. I say this not just as a way of banging out an intro to a review of a movie that I don’t really have much to say about other than “it’s good, I enjoyed it”, but to explain why the main character of Summer Wars, Kenji Koiso resonates with me.

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Hoodwinked! (2005)

I won’t lie guys, that exclamation mark frickin’ terrified me. Unless a movie is a prestigey old-timey musical, an exclamation point has no place in its title. You know what other independently produced CGI movie has an exclamation point in its title?

“They worshiped the dragon who had given authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can wage war against it?”

Fortunately, Hoodwinked! is not as bad as The Abomination and it’s not even the worst movie I’ve reviewed this year (although that is more an indictment of the year than an endorsement of the movie).

So what is Hoodwinked!?

Gah, see, this is the problem with having an exclamation point in the title. It looks like I’m screaming in panic.

Now Hoodwinked! was a movie that I was tangentially aware of. I’d never watched it, but I’d occasionally see it across the crowded room that is the modern animation landscape. And it would wink at me. And I would pretend I hadn’t noticed because it looked like the ugliest fucking Shrek rip-off I had ever seen and there wasn’t enough booze in the world for me to go home with it. But, like anyone who creates content on the internet for long enough, soon enough you find yourself doing things you never would have imagined doing. I watched Hoodwinked!

I have questions.

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The Polar Express (2004)

It’s probably a testament to just how jaded I am that my first thought when watching The Polar Express was “actually, this animation isn’t half bad”. The Polar Express is notorious for being the start of Robert Zemeckis’ turn to the dark side, where one of the most respected directors of genre cinema became a professional corporate necromancer.

Oh shit, I acknowledged its existence. Someone fetch my flail.

And The Polar Express was his first attempt at making an all CGI mocapped film and is infamous for being utterly, skin-crawlingly unsettling in its depiction of human characters. And yet, maybe it’s because I‘ve seen the absolute depths to which this accursed path would lead Zemeckis I found myself not minding the animation too much, for the most part at least. It just looks like a computer game cutscene. And, if I’m being scrupulously fair, there are even shots that I think are honest to God beautiful.

My, this review is trending rather positive isn’t it? I wonder if that will last.

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Redline (2009)

“Hey Mouse have you seen the new Pino..“

Nope. Not gonna do it. Not gonna watch it. Not gonna blog about it. Not gonna contribute to THE DISCOURSE. Not, in short, gonna give the bastards the satisfaction.

Here is what I am going to do. I am going to talk about my new boo.

Redline, a 2009 animé movie released by Madhouse, instantly became one of my all time favourite animations and it didn’t even break a sweat doing it. Which is not to say that it’s one of my favourite movies, necessarily, but as a perfect sugar rush high of the purest joy animation can deliver I struggle to think of its equal. This thing took 7 years to make, comprising 100,000 cels of some of the most gorgeously detailed hand-drawn animation I’ve ever seen.

The movie is the debut feature of animator Takeshi Koike, whose Animatrix short World Record I reviewed a few weeks ago (all part of my cunning plan). But what is this “Red Line”, you ask. What’s it all about, eh?

Okay, so take 2000 AD comics, the works of Jack Kirby and Moebius, Mad Max and pretty much every Franco-Japanese Saturday Morning cartoon from the eighties and put them in a blender. Take enough LSD to turn into a pineapple and serve. That’s Redline. It is AWESOME. If I had seen this when I was ten years old I might have actually died from excitement.

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Shortstember: Matriculated

Studio: DNA

Director: Peter Cheung

Writer: Peter Cheung

Wha’ happen’?

A woman named Alexa and her small cadre of human resistance fighters succeed in capturing a machine and plugging it into their own mini Matrix. There, they try to teach the machine the value of human beings by having sex in front of it while it watches.

After a whole heap of psychedelic faffery the Machine seems to be coming around to team human but, in the real world, the base is attacked by more machines, forcing Alexa’s crew to cut the programme short. They battle the machines and one by one are killed. Alexa begs their prisoner to help them and it does, but it’s too late to save Alexa. Holding her dying body in its arms, the Machine plugs Alexa back into the programme, uploading her consciousness. It then enters the the programme, hoping that it and Alexa can now be together forever. However, realising what’s happened, Alexa promptly dies from shock. The short ends with the Machine sitting alone on a bleak shoreline; “liberated” but completely alone.

How was it?

I’ve never liked Matriculated and it’s hard for me to marticulate, I mean articulate why. But I’ll give it a shot. Firstly, while Peter Cheung (Aeon Flux) certainly has a distinctive style I can’t say it’s one I’ve ever particularly liked. It’s a bit overly detailed and and I can’t get past the fact that everyone looks like a race of overly sexualised giraffe/human hybrids.

Secondly, the animation is done in this faux-trad/CGI style that I just can’t get behind. It just looks plasticky and cheap to me. It’s certainly not terrible but it’s a conspicuosly weak entry for an anthology with such an incredibly high standard in its visuals and animation. Then there’s the story. Matriculated is by far the longest of any of the shorts at a quarter of an hour and it doesn’t really spent its time well. Instead of fleshing out these characters whose deaths we will soon be mourning, the bulk of the short is given over to surreal imagery in the mini-Matrix as the Machine learns what it is to be hoo-man. I’m not exactly sure what the message is either. The humans state that they don’t want to simply re-program the machine and that they want it to discover the joys of free will and join them voluntarily. They reason that since the Machine is enslaved to its programming, it will want to choose to be free. But of course, the humans aren’t going to let the Machine choose to continue trying to kill them. The Machine is free to choose, as long as it makes what the humans consider the correct choice.

To the short’s credit, this very ethical quandary is discussed by the characters and honestly, that’s the part of this story that I’m more interested in. The trippy visuals honestly just feel like chin-stroking padding, especially since, with this animation style I’m not particularly in awe of them even on a purely aesthetic level.

On the plus side, the fact that the main human character has the name of what is now the most famous AI in the world is kinda funny.