DC Direct To Video Animated Films

[GregX]

Has Bruce Timm finally been knocked off his pedestal?

I've been saying for many years that the quality storytelling that did come out of the DCAU should be credited to Alan Burnett.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of people souring on Bruce Timm these last few years, and I think Batman and Harley Quinn finally nailed that coffin.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Not animation, but Neal Adams made an audio play version of Batman vs Elmer Fudd.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I'm very skeptical about anime versions of Western superheroes since they've never been good, but not gonna lie, I think that Batman Ninja looks pretty dope.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, according to Ajay, Gotham by Gaslight is a marked improvement over the previous few DC animated films: https://youtu.be/JoXA7PKzbeg

He is pretty much right about Bruce Timm being a key component to what has been wrong with a lot of these movies recently. The DC DTV flicks have always been a mixed bag for me, but the last few years in particular have been mostly awful. Apparently, despite having some production credits, Timm wasn't as involved with this one, which allows it to actually do its own thing. So, I might give this one a chance.

That said, man does the past few years really make me question how much of Timm's best BTAS episodes were really due to him versus the people reigning him in-check.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Those DC Animated movies did fall out of my radar around the same time Dwayne McDuffie died, and he was the one who steered Justice League to the right course.

[gunswordfist]

Hearing about how much McDuffie did in Justice League makes me want to finally get around to watching all of Unlimited.

[Avaitor]

I've definitely been feeling this way for a while. Truthfully, Timm didn't have too many writing credits on the DCAU, and his directing is competent, but he also generally worked with the stronger writers like Dini. There's no denying that he was an important part of the DCAU, but I'm not sure just how important.

Also, Best Buy has those recent movie and graphic novel bundles on sale for $13, so I finally picked up Year One. I'm pretty excited to finally get to see the movie, and reread the GN.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I really like how they handled the adaptation. Unlike The Killing Joke, they don't try to unnecessarily pad-out the running time to be over an hour long (the feature clocks in at around 50 minutes), and Bryan Cranston may just deliver my favorite on-screen interpretation of Jim Gordon.

Also, is it just me, or did the animation quality of the DC animated movies become really boring and stiff looking in the past few years? Going back to stuff like Year One, TDKR, Wonder Woman, or even All-Star Superman shows some really stellar art and animation. None of it is movie quality, exactly, but it's also above normal TV quality. When you watch stuff like JLD or TKJ, it feels like a slideshow is playing at times.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I still think they should have went with the anthology approach when adapting The Killing Joke, by adapting two other short Batman stories instead of trying to stretch out one. They could have adapted that one Neil Gaiman comic about Poison Ivy, and perhaps a oneshot Grant Morrison made, and called it Batman Anthologies: The British Invasion.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I sure hope this has less farts.

[Dr. Insomniac]

So DC ended their run of DCAMU movies, and...



...yeah.

[Dr. Insomniac]

...

[Daxdiv]

We're gonna get a Doomsday Clock adaptation after this, aren't we?

[Dr. Insomniac]

I don't keep up with those Tomorrowverse movies because I haven't liked the few I watched and haven't heard any good word of mouth about the rest, but I watched the latest one because I heard Friedle was playing Terry in it. And shame on me, because not only does he have 4 lines at most, but the padding in this was awful. The dialogue's almost at 0.5x speed while plot points are endlessly restated. 90 minutes feel like 3 hours. There's a point where a bunch of shadow demons appear, and even though the League analyze their biology and find out killing them won't actually do anything of importance, we still get a third of the movie that's just fight scenes against them in barren cities.

Had a thought recently that if the DC Animated movie is gonna keep going no matter what, why don't they actually do anything cool with it? Like use it to make animated adaptations of unproduced DC scripts such as Aronofsky's Batman, George Miller's Justice League, or Del Toro's Justice League Dark. Why are we getting 3 bloated Crisis on Infinite Earths movies instead?