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Batman-Caped Crusader: Back To The Past

It was well passed the time that we got a new animated series of Batman, especially if it’s being spearheaded by B:TAS forerunner Bruce Timm. For the new show titled Batman: Caped Crusader, it was made to premiere on Amazon Prime instead of a service connected to Warner Bros, plus this was produced by Bad Robot Productions in their first animated TV series. It maintains the dark deco style from the 90s show, but this time it takes place in the 1940s whereas B:TAS had a retro noir motif set in modern day. Instead of focusing on Batman himself, this new show targets the time it’s set in and makes it more mature with a psychological approach and how corruption plays a major part in people’s motivations.

First airing in 2024, the original season went on for a mere 10 episodes like My Adventures With Superman, with plans for the second season to have the same number of episodes. Caped Crusader came out a few months after Disney premiered their X-Men 97 series which also called back to a 90s animated series, but between the two of them X-Men seemed to score more fans partially because there are less people subscribed to Amazon. The saving grace for this was it took place prior to David Zaslav’s striking several Warner productions off for tax purposes, plus Amazon had already signed on for the second season.

Taking place during Batman’s first year, the show is period piece taking place probably prior to America’s entering WWII. This world this takes place in is an alternate reality where there’s less racism and same-sex relationships are more socially accepted. Gotham City here is one of the darkest it’s ever been, particularly with crime and how it depraves the citizens one way or another. The Batman shown here is still a little wet behind his pointy ears and not the seasoned crimefighter most fans are used to, however he still has the same ambition and drive even if some of the technology he used didn’t exist like wireless microphones and personal submarines.

There are a few of Batman’s regular rouges’ gallery here, but with a new twist. Catwoman isn’t the total pro cat burglar we’re used to, Rupert Thorne is the main crime boss, Clayface is Basil Carlo who can only change the shape of his face and not a full shapeshifter, plus a less ambitious Firebug. We’re also graced with the animation premiere of Nocturna and her brother Night-Slayer, although Nocturna is a kind of vampire and much younger than her Dark Knight boyfriend from the 80s. Penguin is the first criminal we meet, except here the character is gender-swapped with two sons. Another change is Harley Quinn who has no connection to the Joker who only shows up at the end of season one, plus here she is Asian American and openly a lesbian. We get a few guest villains who are normally the archenemies of other DC superheroes like Gentlemen’s Ghost and Onomatopia. Harvey Dent eventually becomes Two-Face by the end of the first season, although you can see his ego slowly leading him down the dark path even before his little acid bath. King Tut and Killer Croc make brief appearances, plus detectives Bullock and Flass show that dirty cops are also villains.

Some of the other cast is remade for this Batman incarnation. Alfred is slightly stockier, Jim and Barbara Gordon are both black with Barbara being a public lawyer, and all the potential Robin candidates are younger than they usually are. There are also appearances by other extend DC Universe characters such as Papa Midnite, The Spectre, Plastic Man, The Creeper, and even a Fleischer Studios’ take on Lois Lane who is regularly working out of Gotham instead of Metropolis.

The cast is exemplary with sitcom actor Hamish Linklater taking on the title role, John DiMaggio trading in Joker for Bullock, Tom Kenny as Firebug and as Eel O’Brien (aka: Plastic Man), Krystal Jay Brown as Barbara Gordon: Attorney at Law, Christina Ricci as the rookie Catwoman, Hayley Joel Osment as Night-Slayer, and former-Batman Diedrich Bader now playing Harvey Dent and totally sells it as a more unscrupulous take on the character. Cedric Yarbrough takes on the part of four villains as Rupert Thorne, Killer Croc, Papa Midnite, and Joker.

With animation covered by Studio Grida and Studio IAM, Batman: Caped Crusaders managed to capture the essence of the 90s cartoon series while paying homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood and pulp fiction magazines. Critics appreciated the darker tone that the show took with Batman and his extended cast, plus its open-minded approach to representation. Hopefully the upcoming second season will give the series a significant boost to justify another season, and at least Bruce Timm was able to keep his fanboy impulses down enough so Batgirl did end up sleeping with Batman again.

ANI-MOVIES: *Goat

For Sony Pictures Animation's first theatrical release after the second Spider-Verse installment, Goat had a lot to live up to, especially when they passed on originally putting out K-Pop Demon Hunters before they proceed with this one. It's also a rarity to see an animated feature done as a sports film, so it was a little hard to make skeptical audiences not see this as a ripoff of Animalympics and Zootopia. It takes place in a world of anthropomorphic animals, and like most cartoon worlds similar to this they never address the whole prey/predator dichotomy, somehow all the animals get along with no explanation of why the talking wolves aren't eating the talking chickens. Based on an unpublished book by Chris Tougas, former Venture Bros. artist Tyree Dillihay debuted as a director in this hit that made twice its money back at the box office. The story is a little lacking in plot, but the movie makes up for it in incredible lighting and texture with fine movements making the animation itself the true star of the show.

Set in an animal world, a sport called roarball is their version of basketball, the basic difference is that the court can spontaneously change its landscape. Will is a goat who grew up in the town of Vineland hoping to join the roarball team of the Thorns, and due to a chance match with the out-of-town team captain Mane Attraction, he gets added to the Thorns as their sixth player. The team's star player Jett doesn't like the idea of a smaller animal on the team, but the rest of the players eventually warm up to him after he finally gets a chance to play in the game. Jett also appreciates Will after she sees the impact her career had on her hometown, and the Thorns are on their way to winning the finals. However, the team's greedy owner trades them over to another city before the end of the season, thus deflating the Thorns' chances, but of course they all find their inner-strength and win the championship, plus the team's new owner turns out to be the team's crazy reptile who won it in a game of Uno which deflates the stakes of the whole story.

Since the movie is literally titled after a sports term, Goat doesn't carry much weight as far as even a sports flick is concerned. The characters are very by the numbers, and the film had a total of five producers, but the animation team behind it went all out to make this an astounding visual feast. No idea if this film will be remembered when the next Oscars come around, but Goat's 2D animation rendered in 3D is what made the Spider-Verse movies a hit.

ANI-MOVIES, *The Monkey King

The story of Sun Wukong has been adapted more times than nearly any other character in the world. Journey To The West was turned into dozens of movie and TV shows both live action and animated, plus video games, some of the most popular being Saiyuki, Alakazam The Great, and a little something called Dragonball. The Monkey King is the latest interpretation of the Chinese legend produced by Netflix Animation and Pearl Studio in their follow up to Abominable and Over The Moon. Both studios pushed to make this a mainstream animated family adventure, although it didn't get the kind of reception that Netlix got a year later when they screened Sony's theatrically-rejected K-Pop Demon Hunters. Even though this takes place in ancient China, this was written to be a snappy comedy hoping to appeal to Generation Z which does work against it at times. The film is CGI, although there is an impressive 2D sequence that you wish got its own full movie. The computer animation is pretty fluid with some electrifying fighting scenes and fast-paced magic duels.

A monkey is hatched from a rock and immediately starts ticking off the other monkeys since he doesn't have any parental figure. A tiger demon has been feasting on the younger monkeys, so this unnatural monkey spends the next few years training himself to fight, and then swims to the underwater palace of the Dragon King to take the prized magical staff that our monkey hero can talk to. After using the staff he calls Stick to defeat the demon, he is proclaimed Monkey King by the other monkeys, he however doesn't want to just rule some simians and sets his sights on the heavenly palace and taking his place among the gods. In order to get their attention, Monkey King goes out and kills 99 more demons for an even 100, but his efforts go unnoticed by the gods, so he sets out to become immortal, and takes on a young girl named Lin as his assistant as they go to the underworld to erase his name on Scroll of Life giving himself no expiration date. This only makes him half-immortal, so he and Lin go to the heavens to get a special elixir to make him fully-immortal, but what Monkey King doesn't know is that Lin is secretly working for the Dragon King to get Stick so he can cover the world in water. Once he gets Stick back, Dragon King does a memorable evil villain song and grows to kaiju-size, but he is defeated by Monkey King who feeds of magic lightning and turns into a titan himself. After defeating Dragon King, Monkey King goes a little mad with power, so Buddha shows up and uses Lin as a speaker to get him to calm down and imprisons him inside a mountain for 500 years where he begins his quest to the West.

The Monkey King does grab your attention for most of the run time, although this can get tiresome after a while. After watching this the one time, it takes a sturdy frame to be able keep up with the unrelenting pace. There is too much ego-driven dialogue and situations that instantly escalate into world-shattering threats to keep a bead on any character progression. There is currently a huge amount of movies bearing Monkey King in their total, although this version of Sun Wukong can be slightly intolerable, he's no more narcissistic than any of the other revamp of the hairy hero.

MISC. MANGA, *American Barbarian

Before doing comics of Transformers, Gobots, GI Joe, and Godzilla, comic artist and writer Tom Scioli had his own original series titled American Barbarian which is a collision of Thundarr The Barbarian, Thundercats, and Masters Of The Universe. Indeed, this is a He-Man-themed take on the standard fantasy adventure hugely inspired by the works of Jack Kirby, which most of Scioli's works tend to as he's done the artwork on an entire graphic novel about the life of the King of Comics. Scioli worked on this while he was doing his Godland comic which was also Kirby-esque.

Set in the devastated New Earthea, the barbarian Meric is the last surviving member of a warrior clan who were all wiped out of by the mummy warlord Two-Tank Omen who has a whole working tank for each foot. Meric pretends to join Omen's forces while keeping his family's secret, the mystical Star Sword, hidden from evil. Meric meets up with a tribe of humans and sets them free from the scavengers and then reclaims the sword to have a cataclysmic clash with Two-Tank Omen resulting in the two of them getting sucked up into a black hole. All the remaining humans form the new United States of Barbaria with the hint that Meric will return someday.

With armored swordsmen, robotic dinosaurs, time travel, and sultry slave girls, American Barbarian grew from a webcomic to hit one-shot graphic novel. It contains terrific splash pages and just like Kirby would do when he was creating the New Gods and Thor. It has a real appreciation for the Bronze Age of comics. If you've recently joined the MOTU fandom, then this is a patriotic rainbow of fan nostalgia.

ANI-MOVIE, *Flushed Away

Aside from the fact the film was minus any hamster butlers as shown in certain previews, Aardman's first of only two fully-CGI animated movies wasn't the drowning disappointment most people thought it was. This was the last of three films Aardman did with DreamWorks before joining up with Sony, but instead of the studio's traditional stop motion animation as they did with Wallace And Gromit, Flushed Away was all done digitally which might seem like a stretch for them to take, but then even the Jim Henson Company got roped into doing a few direct-to-video bad 3D releases. It was chosen to go CGI because the majority of the animation takes place around water and would make it difficult to move around clay figures, so Aardman put aside their Gummy standards to give digital animation a shot. Upon first look, some might confuse this for being a Danger Mouse ripoff, but since Flushed Away was directed by animator David Bowers who worked for Cosgrove Hall, you'd be better off thinking of the film as an homage. Along with director Sam Fell, Aardman had a total of five screenwriters to write all of the "witty dialogue". The cast was stacked with Hugh Jackman in the lead role and finally singing, Ian McKellen playing the wannabe Bond villain, Kate Winslet as the inevitable love interest, Jean Reno as the standard French stereotype, plus Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy as a comical pair of henchmen.

Roddy is the pet rat of a rich family in London who leave home for vacation, and he gets literally flushed down the tubes by the intrusive Sid who takes over his pad. Roddy ends up in a rat metropolis within the sewers which is partially run by the criminal boss Toad who captures him and a female ship captain named Rita who he tried to gain passage with back up top. Rita and Roddy escape along with taking Toad's master cable to his apparatus which he planned to wipe out all the rats from the sewer, so Toad sends his cousin Le Frog and his team of French zipper ninjas to get it back. Rita eventually helps Roddy get back to his home, but after realizing that he was miserable being lonely in a such a big palatial estate and figuring out what Toad has planned for the other rats, Roddy gets flushed away again to save everyone.

Flushed Away doesn't have the most spectacular computer graphics in an animated film, however there is some particularly upstanding slapstick and rapid-fire dialogue that make it a comedic watch. It would have been better if Aardman had been able to pull off their usual claymation creations, but the 3D animation is acceptable even if it's not up to Pixar's level. A sample of something that definitely padded out the runtime longer than it needed to be is the singing slugs who show up to do a romantic ditty and demanding to be noticed, as if the slugs were the prototype for the Minions from Despicable Me that Illumination totally stole from. Your kids might just see this film as a fun sit to fill out an afternoon, but Anglophiles and animation fans should get a kick out of it.

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