Director: Peter Rida Michail, Aaron Horvath
Cast: Greg Cipes, Scott Menville, Khary Payton, Tara Strong
Have I Seen it Before: No, and I’m sad that I hadn’t.
Did I Like It: There’s not a moment where this movie has any interest in annoying me. Your mileage may vary, but you’d be wrong.
There’s no denying that Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is not meant for me, but I’m still content to take it for my own. It is often childish, including both what might be the longest sustained fart joke in the history of the movies, and a prolonged gag that involves the misuse of a stage toilet, but I don’t care. As a longtime enthusiast of superhero films, this film bewitched me at nearly every turn. I have next to no awareness of the Teen Titans team before this screening, and next to no knowledge of the television series Teen Titans Go! that spawned the movie. From the opening vanity cards featuring a willfully daffy Daffy Duck, to Robin’s final, desperate attempts to get kids to think about something as the credits threaten to eclipse the film, I am now a Teen Titans fan. Also, the animation legacy of Warner Bros. and DC is strong, even if their live action division can’t quite get it consistently together.
As such, it will prove difficult to provide an in depth analysis of why the film works so thoroughly. Therefore, I will leave you with an impassioned plea to go see the movie, and a list of mildly spoiler-adjacent things that piqued my delight during the tragically slim 88 minute running time.
The opening shot is of someone flipping through a comic book, a la a different comic book label’s various movie ventures.
Nicolas Cage is Superman. Everything is great.
No joke, I'd watch an Alfred movie.
A quick, although not slavish reference to Animaniacs. I, and nearly everyone my age appreciates that.
A Stan Lee cameo. Even if it would be on a list of growingly finite such appearances, it was a nice little gag.
An extended Back to the Future (1985) riff that either makes a substantial argument that this film may be less for children born in the second decade of the twenty-first century than it might seem on the surface, or that all people of all ages love Back to the Future, and Universal Parks had no right removing The Ride from their catalogue.
And, for the sheer tonnage of self-reverential jokes about superhero movies, it does not include an obligatory tag scene. One might think of that as a missed opportunity, but for me the film has engendered such consistent good will, that I’m willing to dub it as bold instead.