Director: Jake Castorena
Cast: Troy Baker, Eric Bauza, Darren Criss, Kyle Mooney
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: I’ve been on the record about not liking many of the string of DC animated films. The more essential the Batman story, the more epic in scope, the more disappointing the film ends up being*.
That’s kind of the beauty part of this film. The crossover comic putting the Dark Knight and the Heroes in the Half Shell barely meant much of anything, and the film has little to live up to, and passes those expectations.
First of all, the movie opens with Barbara Gordon (Rachel Bloom) handling things in the way only she can. I submit that there is no other character in the popular culture who is more mistreated than Babs. Warner Bros. cancels whole-ass movies starring her**. Birds of Prey (2020) flat-out forgets that she ever existed. And don’t get me started on Batman: The Killing Joke (2016). Let’s just say that sometimes I feel something less than ambivalent about the animated adaptations of beloved Batman stories.
The Turtles here are well-drawn, feeling modern but occasionally hearkening back to some of their well-known adventures. Better still, they’re all in awe of Batman (Baker, pulling double duty as Wayne and the Joker, and somehow evoking an essence of Conroy and Hamill in the process), and that feels incredibly relatable. I also think Donatello (Baron Vaughn) has a all-vibes crush on Barbara Gordon, which is almost too relatable.
The mashing of these two worlds may not feel like they would go together, but there’s something very nice about putting Batman in a state of discomfort. The re-worked comic covers over the ends credits replace the Outsiders of the 1980s with the Turtles, and that feels like an incisive parallel. We don’t get enough Batman stories that put him as the unlikely center of mismatched a team. There should be more.
The whole film becomes sort of charming, in the end. It’s no Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), but it may just end up being my second favorite Batman animated film. The things I will do if Barbara Gordon is given her fair shot to shine.
How did I get through this whole review without complaining about how adding “vs.” to a movie title obscures the fact that it inevitably amounts to “this set of characters and this other set of characters initially have a disagreement and then decide that they must band together to combat a common foe.”
Well, I guess I just did.
*You can look forward to my inevitably less-than-enthused review of Batman: Knightfall sometime next year.
**When will I get over that? The answer is never.