Batman Gotham Knight sounded like a much better idea than it turned out to be.
5 different anime directors give us their imaginings of the Dark Knight just in time to serve as an appetizer for the biggest movie of the summer.
But as it turns out, there is not an original idea among them. All moody and morbidly serious without a second of fun throughout.
For all the power of Batman’s gallery of bad guys, we get 12 seconds of Killer Croc for no apparent reason, a smidgen of scarecrow to remind us he was the villain in Batman Begins and a story with Deadshot that is so by the numbers that I actually dozed off.
There is NOTHING original here. Even Kevin Conroy, the official animated voice of the Dark Knight for about 20 years now sounds as if he is phoning it in.
The first story in the anthology is called “Have I got a Story to Tell You” – it is a piece told from the POV of a group of street kids who have seen the Bat in action in person. It is supposed to show how different people perceive him differently based on experience and situation. The biggest problem is that this story has been told in animation already as part of the wildly more entertaining Batman – The Animated Series and also as an issue of Detective Comics in the early eighties.
Sadly, this whole thing feels hacky and I really WANTED to like it.
Swing and a big miss by the “masters” of anime.
Check it outta the Redbox if you think I’m being too hard on it – but let me know if you disagree.
Posted by calmixx 
