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'Batmanime' Is a Blast in Batman: Gotham Knight
By Scott Thil
The geek machine has fired into overdrive for Christopher Nolan's incoming prequel sequel, The Dark Knight. But the untold hero of this summer's Batman assault may lie elsewhere -- in the Animatrix-inspired Batman: Gotham Knight, to be exact.
Like The Matrix franchise before it, the Batman franchise has learned that filtering your mythology through the kinetic template of anime can do wonders for your upgrades. Batman: Gotham Knight is that upgrade, and it looks kickass. The Warner Bros. DVD-only film, due out July 8, sent Underwire these sneak-peek pics, which make great eye candy. The hi-def trailer is at right.
Perhaps it's because Batman comes from comics, or perhaps it's because animated film moves in ways the real world cannot, but live-action adaptations of comics are a mixed bag. Maybe the success of Batman Begins and Iron Man can change that.
But until they do, the animated realm may reign for awhile.
The "Batmanime" mash is already under way. The current TV series The Batman has incorporated Japanese elements for five seasons now, and it is one of the best shows around. Joker is a martial arts master in it, for frak's sake, as is the chubby Penguin, who has two masked hench-femmes of his own slicing and dicing their way through Gotham City. But that's kids play compared to what Batman: Gotham Knight has to offer.
"From a visual point of view, this is the most stylized Batman that's come out of Warner Bros.," explained Batman lifer Alan Burnett in a press release. "What they've done is really eye-catching, and it truly expands his world. Their visualization of Gotham City is stunning, and it's very interesting to see how they've envisioned Batman, his environment and his action and movements."
The award-winning Burnett's work is all over Batman: Gotham Knight, as it is in The Batman, Batman Beyond and further back into the Dark Knight multiverse. He served as a story editor for the film at large, and wrote the noirish sixth segment, which features an appearance by the heartless killer Deadshot, whose bullets have so far kept him off of kids' television.
"I've always liked Deadshot as a villain, and I really like stories with assassins," Burnett added. "The fact that they're killers, and what they do has impact, automatically heightens the energy of the story."
Burnett is joined by famed comics scribes Greg Rucka and Brian Azzarello, as well as cinema and TV writers Josh Olson (A History of Violence), David S. Goyer (Batman Begins) and Jordan Goldberg (The Dark Knight). But the new visionaries of this iteration, as with eye-popping, brain-crunching Animatrix, are the mostly Pacific Rim directors hired on to stylize Bruce Wayne's superego for the 21st century, including Shojiro Nishimi, Futoshi Higashide, Hiroshi Morioka, Yasuhiro Aoki, Toshiyuki Kubooka and Jong-Sik Nam.
It's by far the darkest Dark Knight ever to hit the screens, large or small.
Early reviews have come in (spoiler alert!) on Batman: Gotham Knight already, and they're pretty much saying the same thing we are: It kicks holy ass. Time will tell if it will prove as explosive as Nolan's live-action iteration. But since Batmanime doesn't have an ounce of the promotion or hype that its real-world counterpart possesses, one could say the deck may be stacked against it. After all, it's going straight to DVD and its release is setting the table for The Dark Knight, which comes out weeks later on July 25 in the United States.
But that's what they said about The Animatrix, too, which is still eminently watchable. Matrix Revolutions? Not so much.
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So apparently Batman is getting an animated revamp in time for the new release of The Dark Knight. I'm not sure how I feel after watching the trailer for the dvd, but it does look like it has the potential to be pretty awesome.
