As an added bonus by DC comics, a new animation has been created to supplement the new Dark Knight movie releasing this week. On July 11th Batman: Gotham Knight was released.
This animation is meant to fill in some gaps between the first BATMAN BEGINS movie and the second Christopher Nolan film; Dark Knight. Unfortunately it does not do a very good job.
My take on this movie is that it was overall good. But not great. Its interesting because its trying to explain parts of Batman’s life that you don’t see in the movies…. About how he gets his money, technology, why people are afraid of him, his personality. And the way this is done is by going through 6 short stories. Each one is by a different director and artist. The movie is done in the style of Japanese animation for the most part (indeed, Japanese language is also available)…
The problem is this :
Animations that come straight-to-dvd and never get to theaters… such as this… are usually picked upby people that are crazy about something… in this case I bet most people getting this movie will be people who read the comics regularly and know of the batman stories. People that casually went to see the movies which SHOULD be watching this movie… will not. The experienced batman reader does NOT need an explanation on how batman is the way he is and what the world sees him like. Much less… he doesn’t need it to be PG-13…. I found this movie redundant… showing me things I’ve seen when I was younger in old BATMAN animated series.
It’s not bad, mind you… but could have been much better.
Could these animation movies be a good lecture as “Origin” story of Batman for me…? 🙂