Batman: Year One (Film) – Review

By: Tab Murphy (writer), Sam Liu & Lauren Montgomery (directors), Bryan Cranston, Eliza Dushku, Benjamin McKenzie (voice actors)

The Story: Uplifting a depraved city takes more than just putting on some tights, you know.

The Review: No matter how grim cartoons get, we still rarely think of them as truly edgy or dangerous, at least enough to satisfy the adult palette.  Japanese animators have been doing this kind of dramatic work for years, basically, but of all the American producers, only DC has ventured into that territory with commercial success.  With each yearly release of their animated films, they’ve shown a willingness to take bigger risks, yielding more fruitful results each time.

You can see the evolution in the animation.  All-Star Superman showed subtle signs of moving toward an anime standard of production, but in this film, it’s unmistakable, beautiful, and fitting.  By now, DC has grown quite formidable at depicting action, but here they show surprising aptitude for subtle body movements and changes in expression that gives a whole new level of craft to the “acting.”  The animation itself shows emotion, even without the voice actors’ help.

But then, we’re working with a pretty excellent source to begin with.  Anyone who’s flipped through Frank Miller’s original story arc knows what a groundbreaking piece of work it is.  So much of its success derives from what Miller left brilliantly unspoken; as aggressive as it seems, most of its tension feels almost subconscious.  This film is about as faithful an adaptation of all those qualities as it can get, and remains gripping nearly its entire length as a result.

If you want to capture the Miller spirit, you better just go for it, and Murphy, Montgomery, and Liu pull no punches.  Fifteen minutes in, you’ve got violent cops, corruption almost visibly festering in all places, fist-fights with pimps and prostitutes, underage hookers stabbing men in the thigh, even (unless I misheard it) an F-bomb at one point.  Heck, you even get to see a couple stark-naked men, bound up and lying (privates-side down) around.

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights – Movie Review

Although DC’s big-screen movie treatments tend to run the gamut between terrific and disappointing, their animated original movies have been almost without exception solid.  With all their experience in the field, it’s no wonder they seem to have refined their process to the point where they can churn out a consistently strong quality for their animated ventures.  It’s this high production standard that occasionally makes up for an underdeveloped story.

In this case, you’ve actually got a series of episodic tales, each featuring one or two of the more popular Green Lanterns, and then you also have an overarching plot that allows these shorter stories to be told.  Ultimately these shorts steal a lot of time and tension away from the major conflict of the movie, and considering it involves Krona’s invasion into our universe and his attempt to destroy Oa, you’d expect greater stakes than what you ultimately end up getting.  Even the resolution seems simplistic to the point where you wonder why the Guardians (or anyone who’s watched Star Trek) didn’t think of it themselves.

But as to the mini-features that make up the bulk of the movie, they each stand up well in their own right and offer a tempting idea of what a Green Lantern TV series would look like.  In a lot of ways, the format strongly resembles the Star Wars: The Clone Wars show in that the movie focuses on Hal Jordan and his new apprentice Arisia, while mainly using them as a vehicle to introduce and delve into their fellow Corpsmen.