ANI-MOVIES, *Batman: Knightall: Part 1-Knightfall

In the mid-90s, DC Comics decided to replace their Big 3 with some replacements. Where The Death Of Superman "killed off" the Man of Steel and replaced him with four understudies, Knightfall went a less lethal route by having Batman getting critically injured and replaced by someone who wasn't a Robin. Like Crisis On Infinite Earths, Warner Bros. Animation decided to turn this adaptation into a trilogy, even though there still isn't a collected Blu-Ray of all three movies, so you might not see a box set of the entire Knightfall trilogy for some while. This first part is titled Knightfall which is of course the beginning of the Batman: Knightfall saga, but it looks strange to have the same name twice in a single title, plus this isn't part of the any of the other DC Universe animated project since the Tomorrowverse concluded in 2024. The character designs are straight out of the 90s comics event and captured Norm Breyfogle's vision along with Kelley Jones' gothic cover art, so anyone who grew up on reading this story arc back in the day should be satisfied.

It opens with Batman encountering an armored assassin called Azrael who was brainwashed by the hidden Order of St. Dumas to exterminate the guilty, and Batman takes in the young man named Jean Paul and tries to deprogram him along with Tim Drake who is the latest Robin. Prior to this, an unnamed child survived growing up in a Caribbean prison and becomes the test subject of an experimental steroid called venom which increases his strength and intellect. With these new abilities he takes on the name Bane and escapes to Gotham City with the intent of defeating Batman and taking over all on his own. To do this, he busts all the inmates out of Arkham Asylum, so Batman runs himself ragged trying to catch all the escaped lunatics, even though Joker is suspiciously missing from the mayhem. Robin takes Azrael to find out who caused the outbreak in the first place, but Azrael starts to give into his bad habits and spirals into despair. Robin is caught by Bane who says he already knows his and Batman's secret identity, however Robin gets free and makes it to the Batcave where Batman gets angry and fired him. Bane then breaks into Wayne Manor, knocks out Robin and Alfred, then proceeds to give Batman a stone-cold beatdown and breaks his spine, dropping the Dark Knight onto a city of onlookers.

This first part of Knightfall compresses a lot of the original preliminary build up to the comic book, like greatly shortening the Azrael introductory mini-series, plus Tim Drake's freshmen run as Robin gets thinned out. One major factor that was abandoned for the movie is that building up to before Bane arrives in Gotham, Batman was working his fingers to the bone just keeping Gotham together which went on for weeks, whereas here it's only two days. For Batman, two days isn't even slight overtime as he's gone whole weeks with no sleep in the comics, so it's hard to believe in this abridged version of the story. The animation is up to specs, especially the boss fight between Bane and Batman, despite the fact that the movie's take on Bane has him being twice as big here as he was on the comics. The movie could have been longer by an extra couple of minutes to fill in some of these inconsistencies, although it is a decent intro to the trilogy going forward.