Batman: Under the Red Hood - Page 2

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Originally Posted by wadew1 

Superman/Shazam: The Return of Black Adam is up on Netflix instant and it includes all of the shorts.

Thanks for the heads-up. The Spirit short remains the best DC DVD animated work yet.

Those shorts are the best thing DC Animation has done since Justice League went away.

I had a really odd reaction to this.

The design and style of the thing was so close to the animated series, but the change in voice cast just sort of pulled me out. It was like someone pantomining the Animated Series corpse. In particular I could hear, exactly, how Hamill's Joker would have read the Joker's dialogue in this and it just distracted me from DiMaggio's performance. I get that he was trying another take on the character but it just really seemed to lack oomph, definitely my least favourite Joker interpretation.

Greenwood was bizarre as Batman, just a full on Kevin Conroy pastiche. I actually thought Jensen Ackles was the bright spot, voice acting wise, probably because I didn't have any preconceived notions of the character. I also liked Jason Isaacs as Ra's Al Ghul, largely because I just generally like Jason Isaacs.

The tone seemed off to me as well. Whilst I appreciated the choreography and the weight given to action sequences, I found it perhaps a little too 'grim-dark'. I guess if you're adapting, partially, A Death in the Family you can't avoid the Grim-Dark but it came across as a little much in this.

I actually thought more family orientated films like Mask of the Phantasm and Return of the Joker were more 'adult' in their tone and content than this.

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Originally Posted by Spike Marshall 
The tone seemed off to me as well. Whilst I appreciated the choreography and the weight given to action sequences, I found it perhaps a little too 'grim-dark'. I guess if you're adapting, partially, A Death in the Family you can't avoid the Grim-Dark but it came across as a little much in this.

 

I have had this problem with all their animated works thus far. Just a bit too much "edge" but not a whole lot of interesting insight. And this one just veered too closely to "bleak" and "overly violent" while also not taking the time to examine the psychological ramifications of Batman trying and failing to build his own family, and having it come back from the past to destroy him.

I think DC has done a decent job with them, but just too much PG-13 "violence" and too little intriguing character work sinks them all for me. It just feels like an attempt to copy the beats from the comics with some neat Screenwriting 101 tricks to condense everything, but without an interest in examining what these ideas MEAN when viewed in a new medium. It's xeroxing, and does a great disservice to the source material every time, even if the Red Hood comic backstory is Wank Central.

My favorite of these remains the Batman: Gotham Knight anthology.