I’m with you on that. Although I also agree with the critiques of the animation. It does look fairly cheap. However, I’m hoping those are just downgraded animation for an early trailer or something.
But even if that’s not the case, I will buy three copies of this. One to watch, one to seal into a vault for future generations, and one to sleep with every night.
The animation is spotty in parts, but it generally looks consistent with the other recent PG-13ish animated movies.
I am not up on current animated features that aren’t directed to small children but yeah, that bit of Batman walking in front of the cells was rough. Any chance that’s just bad YouTube playback or something?
If you didn’t hear about it, the San Diego Comic Con panel for this movie was a dumpster fire. They screened the whole thing for the audience and there was not a great reception to it.
One of the things that fans have been iffy about was the fact that they added a bunch of stuff for Batgirl because as Bruce Timm put it, they wanted to expand on her story and give the audience a reason to care about her when Joker shoots her. Unfortunately, one of the bits they added was a sex scene with Batman. No, really. Bruce and Barbara get it on and it’s not like they don’t know who their alter egos are either. Creep factor 1000. To make matters worse, after getting it on, Batman spurns Batgirl. Then the Joker does his Killing Joke thing.
As you can imagine, people had some strong opinions about it.
[quote]
But afterward, things got heated when one fan asked, “You have talked about how you wanted to give Barbara more story … and yet the story you gave her ended up being about the men in her life. Why?”
Screenwriter Brian Azzarello responded by calling Barbara “stronger than the men in her life in this story.”
“She controls the men in her life in this story,” he said.
The fan shouted that she was strong by “using sex” as he walked away from the mic, sparking a minutes-long discussion about the scene. When Azzarello said he couldn’t hear what the fan said, he challenged the fan to repeat himself, saying, “Wanna say that again? Pussy?”[/quote]
I managed to see this over the weekend.
tl;dr: “Meh”, bordering on “bad”.
Caveat: I am not a casual Batman dude, but nor am I a hard-core Batman guy. Although I’ve seen a good number of Batman:The Animated Series shows, I certainly haven’t seen them all or even most of them. I never subscribed to the Batman comics when I was a kid. Why this matters may become important further in this post.
Non-spoilers for the movie: The tone and pacing on this thing were all over the map, not to mention the characterization being mystifying. Finally, the ending was simply bizarre; it effectively screeched to a halt, turned left and then the engine just stopped running. Weird.
So first off, you pretty much have to be pretty familiar with the Batman mythos and the Timm-verse going into this thing. They don’t spend any time telling you about Batman’s origin story and they expect you to know who the Joker, who Gordon is, and who Batgirl is when you start watching. That’s more than fine; chances are no one is going to grab this without all that background, and if you rent a Batman movie without knowing who Commissioner Gordon is, you’ve got worse problems than being lost in a movie.
Still in non-spoiler territory! The first third to maybe two-fifths of of the story focuses on Batgirl. She’s impulsive, eager-to-please, and she has a secret crush on the emotionally-distant Batman. He wants her to back-off from trying to capture a mob guy that has a creepy fascination with her, and she thinks he’s being over-protective and she can handle herself. This plays out over about 45 minutes of the movie and pretty much resolves itself in the way a typical BtaS episode would have… except for…
The weird sex thing. Here’s where my unfamiliarity with the modern Batman comics and maybe the extended Bruce Timm series might be failing me. Was there some romance between Barbara Gordon and Batman? Because otherwise this was completely out of left field. Nothing int he previous portion of the movie - or anything in the REST of the movie - indicates any interest on Batman’s part. It seems like a teenager pretty much threw herself at him and he kind of shrugged and went with it… which really doesn’t match Batman’s overall “vibe”.
But after the main thread of Barbara Gordon’s young rebellious ways are put to rest, the movie pretty much shelves her. She’s just a prop for the rest of the movie and the focus now shifts to a new “main character”; Batgirl actually doesn’t utter any more dialog until the end credits. You’d think that new protagonist would have been Batman (who up to this point has been a secondary character), but no… the second half of the movie is focused on the Joker.
[spoiler]Yeah, the second half of the movie is actually the Joker’s “origin story”.
Again, I will caution that although I think I have a better-than-average knowledge of Batman lore, I am not an expert of all things Batty.
I guess one of the things that I always liked about the Joker was that his past was always kind of shrouded in semi-mystery. We knew that he was a “bad guy” before he became the Joker, and that an encounter with Batman dunked him in some chemicals that turned his skin white, his hair green, and his mind fruity. As far as I was aware, the Joker’s life before he goes nuts is either unknown or intentionally ignored.
Not so here. The second half of the film is spent showing the Joker’s previous life as a good-hearted but inept comedian who gets swept up into a single mob caper that goes bad. Through basically no fault of his own he gets dumped into the chemicals by Batman and turns into the Clown Prince of Crime. In other words, this movie has the Joker as a total innocent who is effectively turned into a super-villain by Batman.[/spoiler]
Finally, the ending. I THINK that the director and the writers wanted to make some point about needless violence and how sane people resolve their differences with a minimum of fisticuffs… but it came directly after a long sequence of largely needless violence, so… yeah. It them pretty much ends on a seriously weird note as…
Batman starts to laugh manically after the Joker tells a really, really poor joke.
Honestly, if you’re a fan of the Animated Series and Conroy/Hamil’s work, you probably want to give this one a pass. It’s not a great way to cap off an otherwise wonderful body of work.
Yes, the original Alan Moore comic depends on the reader already knowing a bunch of Batman lore. The big hook at the time was the Joker origin story, so it wasn’t really meant for non-comic readers to pick up and enjoy. That’s all changed in the intervening years with a dozen Batman movies, but it’s still not a great casual fan Batman book because it’s so freaking weird regardless. That joke and the abrupt ending? 100% Moore.
That 45 minutes at the beginning of the movie with Batman and Batgirl? That’s not in the comic at all. That’s all new stuff they added to round out the story.
One of the criticisms of The Killing Joke is that Barbara Gordon is used as a plot device to motivate the hero and is not a character on her own. (She predates the whole “women in refrigerators” thing.) Another point fans levy against the story is that if you didn’t know who Barbara Gordon was, other than being Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, you’d never know that she was Batgirl. This is all stuff Alan Moore says he’s painfully aware of now, but the fact remains that a lot of comic readers took it all to heart and it became a classic on par with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.
Alan Moore has said that he kind of regrets writing it. He disliked the way DC turned it into canon (which it was not supposed to be) and he’s since done some maturing and no longer thinks Barbara Gordon was handled well. He also never meant for people to interpret The Joker’s attack as a rape, but since he didn’t explicitly say Barbara Gordon wasn’t raped in the comic, a lot of people came to that conclusion anyway since she winds up nude in the photos. Taken altogether, it’s a whole heap of women’s issues.
The solution the film creators came to for this movie was to add a whole bunch of stuff for Batgirl to do at the beginning. Unfortunately, Bruce Timm has this weird fetish about Batgirl and Batman hooking up. (Seriously, he’s nuts about it.) Also, adding a bunch of Batgirl stuff in the beginning, still leaves her as a prop when The Killing Joke story kicks in, so it actually doesn’t solve anything. In fact, one could argue that it makes it all that much worse since it makes the mentor/student relationship between Batman and Batgirl ultra-creepy.
Beyond all that, I agree that The Joker is better without an explicit origin story. It’s the one thing most comic readers agree on as well. While DC ran with Barbara Gordon being paralyzed in the canon comics and becoming The Oracle, they’ve soundly rejected the sad comedian Joker origin.
I glanced upwards and didn’t see this interview with Bruce Timm linked. If he does have a weird bat-family-shipping thing going on, he’s not admitting it.
[Interviewer] I’m guessing there will be a lot of
conversation after the movie’s release about the sex scene. At what
point in the creative process did you come up with that idea?
[Timm] It came from a three-way conversation between [co-producer] Alan Burnett,
[screenwriter] Brian Azzarello, and myself. I don’t remember who
initially came up with the idea, but we all kind of jumped on it all at
the same time and said, Yeah, that’s kind of where we need to go. My memory kind of says it was Brian, maybe, who came up with the idea. But I’m not sure.
He goes on to say that he’s not overly fond of The Killing Joke. Which I get, it’s probably my least favorite Alan Moore story too.