The Batman: Pics, Videos, and Other Awesomeness

I was talking about one small subset of animated DC movies, not all animated DC ever.

I own a copy of the Dark Knight Returns comic. The animated movie is almost panel per panel identical.

In my mind, it feels like the animated movie being the best should have an asterisk because it was a copy and paste of the greatest graphic novel ever made. The one that saved the Batman franchise from it's long decline.

 

Speaking of Batman's declining years, they were nevertheless hilarious.

Perhaps all future actors seeking to play Batman should audition this scene. I would very much like to hear Kevin Conroy and Christian Bale do this scene.

 

The season finale to Young Justice season 4 was very satisfying.

I don't know how season 4 compares to the others. This season tried something new. I guess Bruce Timm and Greg Weisman are now in a situation where they have more creative control. Which is good, they are very gifted creators but they can still make mistakes (Like The Last Laugh animated movie).

So this was divided into six roughly length story arcs centered around one POV character, then at the the end everything was woven together.

It also helps plug up potential plot holes. Captain America: the Winter Soldier was an awesome movie in terms of cinematography, acting, and pacing.

My main problem in that movie was that there was zero reason why Captain America couldn't have called in Ironman and the Hulk to help him smash the doomsday weapon. Thor was presumably off-world.

The world of Young Justice has LOTS of superheroes in it, but it is not always easy to call in reinforcements because the Justice League and their allies are very busy. Why is the POV character stuck dealing with only three or four allies? Well 30% of the Justice League is off in space on three different mission. 10% is recuperating from injuries or PTSD, 20% of the league is dealing with secret identity real life life problems and the remainder are on three different continents dealing with three different crises.

10-15% of every episode is little vignettes of what everyone else is doing which can be interesting sometimes and tedious at other times, but at least it seems to make sense for the story and makes the world feel alive.

 

I just saw the 2021 animated movie, Injustice. Same basic story of the video game and comic series. There was nothing wrong with it. It had good animation, good pacing, good voice acting, good story construction.

The problem is, I read every single comic book in the Injustice and the comic series was a masterpiece. Roughly 110 comic books of around 20-24 pages each crammed in a movie just under 90 minutes. They did a great job on the cut all things considered. If you had to put everything in 90 minutes, they picked the best 90 minutes.

In the comics and video game, it took Superman five years to fall to corruption and in the movie it took about five months.

I really liked the comic series. Superman, Batman, Catwoman, Damian Wayne, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Flash, Hal Jordan, and Black Canary all had very complex character arcs.

Plastic Man, Shazam, Bane, Sinestro, and many others had short but satisfying character arcs. There were hundreds of DC characters involved and it was great to how Superman losing his way affected everyone.

I mean, I got to see Trigon the demon fight Mr. Mxylplc!

But in a 90 minute movie, you only get to cover the bare bones. A lot of named characters died in the movie rather anticlimactically compared to the comic book deaths.

It vaguely reminds of Incredibles 2. There is nothing wrong with Incredibles 2, it just happens to follow The Incredibles which is practically perfect. Compared to "perfect", "okay" looks like dog turds.

That's my spoiler free movie review.