Blog Archives
Superhero Shorts: Batman vs. The Terminator
It feels like it’s been a long while since I’ve had the chance to do one of these but I’m back with another Superhero Shorts and it’s a good one. This time around I’m talking with amateur animator Mitchell Hammond who spent 4 years working on this short completely by himself using digital frame-by-frame animation. He created a world set in the Terminator universe where Batman exists and is working with, or at least parallel to John Connor where he is trying to take down Skynet. As always, you can watch the short right below, or you can check it out on Mitchell’s blog along with other behind the scenes info.
Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher
Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher 2014
Last year when I watched the Marvel Iron Man anime movie Rise of Technovore, the best part of that movie were the bits featuring the Punisher, so while that movie was ok but fairly middling, I had quite a bit more hope for this one. But what I ended up getting was more of the same. I do think that the way this movie handles the Punisher as a character is much better than the way he is handled in any of the other live action movies, but I wasn’t as fond of how it handles Black Widow. There are plenty of well done fight scenes, but they had a little too much anime flair to them and some of the voice acting fell a bit flat except for one role who played it overly animated. The plot kept things interesting and while I didn’t like everything in this movie, there was plenty enough to keep me in through the end of the movie. A step up from last year’s Technovore, but only a small step.
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Stan Lee’s Mighty 7
Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 2014
I just happened to stumble across this a few days ago and since it was pretty short at just about an hour long I decided to check it out as a bit of a sorbet between horror bites. It’s basically an extended TV show pilot though I haven’t read if it is going to become a show or not. The movie centers on Stan Lee as a caricature of himself, or at least the personality he portrays as his somewhat public persona. He stumbles upon a crashed ship of aliens, including two essentially space cops and five until recently captive fugitives which he eventually gets to sign a contract so he can use their likenesses in a new comic book sold as a reality superhero show. It originally aired on the Hub network and it is pretty obvious that it is aimed at kids, but there is a bit of fun to be had here and there aside from the cliché storylines and silly humor. I seriously doubt that it would be anything that I would find myself watching on a regular basis if it did become a full fledged cartoon series, but if there was another short movie like this I would check it out.
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JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time
JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time 2014
This is a movie you might not have heard about until recently even if you follow DC Animation, it’s a bit of a stealth release, only popping up on people’s radars when it was included in Target’s mailer last week as it is a Target DVD exclusive. One thing I immediately found out about it was that it is something much lighter in tone than many of the recent DC Animated movies. It’s much more in line with an updated version of Super Friends so I was excited because it was something that I could watch with my daughter Jena without worrying if there was too much blood in it. I’m always a fan of a time travel story and this has some very fun moments without bogging itself down with the nitty gritty details of it. The movie mainly follows a couple soon-to-be-members of the Legion of Super-heroes 1,000 years in the future: Dawnstar and Karate Kid. But back in the present, there’s also plenty of the Justice League and the Legion of Doom with many of their classic Super Friends roster with the addition of Cyborg who was only in the tail end of the Super Friends. I had a lot of fun with this movie and so did Jena.
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Justice League: War
Justice League: War 2014
Taking a quick break from the non-superhero comic book adaptations I watched a couple brand new DC Animation releases: Justice League: War and JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time. My review of Trapped in Time will be up in a couple days, but first I’m going to talk a bit about Justice League: War which is the first Animated offering from DC’s New 52 timeline offering up yet another Justice League origin story, though I haven’t read any of the New 52. Fortunately, even though a lot of it is the same thing we’ve seen more than a couple times, it’s still a fun ride. After the very dark turn in DC Animation with Dark Knight Returns and The Flashpoint Paradox, War lightens things up quite a bit while not going all the way around to being too shallow. There’s still plenty of action to be had here and they sneak in a single swear word, but the blood is kept to a minimum. It was also a nice change of pace to add Shazam into the mix, as he’s not usually one of the regulars in these movies.
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Superhero Shorts: Superman vs. Hulk
Welcome back to another edition of Superhero Shorts where I take a look at a superhero themed short film and ask a few questions of the filmmaker. Today I’m talking with Mike Habjan and his animated fight sequence between Superman and the Incredible Hulk which he has been working on for several years now and still isn’t fully finished. You can watch the most recent section of the fight below, or you can see all of his animations on his YouTube Channel, or through the playlist which I set up.
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies 2009
Happy New Year! There hasn’t been a lot of voting in my “what I should watch in 2014” poll, but the winner in both the poll and the comments was non-superhero movies. So at least here in January, I’ll be watching some more varied movies that are still based on comics. But today I’m doing what I thought I did a couple months back until I realized that there was still a DC animated movie that I had yet to review, even though I had seen it before my website days. Public Enemies was the first of these movies to really focus on the Batman/Superman team up, and while I didn’t like it as much as Apocalypse, I still had a lot of fun with it.There’s a ton of cameos of various supervillains and some lesser known heroes, but it brings back the ever familiar voices for Batman, Superman, and Lex Luthor which is always a good sign even if it has a couple odd patches here and there.
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My Top 10 DC Animated Movies
After watching and reviewing Justice League: The New Frontier, I thought I had finished watching and reviewing all of the DC Animated movies that have been currently released. After writing this list, I realized I still have one to review (Public Enemies), but I have seen it before so whatever. I’ve always enjoyed watching these animated movies from Marvel, DC, and even some of the other non-affiliated animated movies like Bolt, the Incredibles, or Megamind. But even though these are all released direct-to-DVD and have never gotten a theatrical run since going way back to the Batman: The Animated series spin-off movie Mask of the Phantasm (which I sadly have yet to see, but also don’t include in this series of Warner Premier original DC Animated movies), they are all done with quality writing, are often based on acclaimed comic book runs, have excellent voice casts, and high quality-within-a-budget animation. And what better way to wrap up these movies, so to speak, than with a list of my favorites, which started as just a top 5 list and when I kept finding titles I just couldn’t exclude, grew into a top 10 list, which is a bit over half of the currently 17 released titles with 2-3 new ones coming out every year. So, without ado…
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Filmwhys #16 North by Northwest and Persepolis
I’m back once again with another episode of Filmwhys, aka the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast. This week my guest is Pat McDonnell of 100 Years of Movies who asks me the question why haven’t I seen North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s classic Cary Grant movie featuring the famous scene of him being chased by a cropduster in the middle of an open field. And in return, I ask him why he hasn’t seen the animated graphic novel adaptation of Marjan Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis where she follows her early life living in Iran during a revolution and a war and the oppression of the Islamic Fundamentalists while she is an outspoken woman who eventually flees to spend time in France.
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Batman: Gotham Knight
Batman: Gotham Knight 2008
It had been a long time since I visited this movie so I figured it was overdue for a revisit. Gotham Knight is one of the more unique entries in the DC Animation canon. It’s an anthology consisting of several short films loosely tied together and all featuring Batman in one way or another. While they did try this again later on with Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, this one is done by different anime directors with very different styles while Emerald Knights all shared the same style as they were done by a single director within DC Animation. While there are a few high points, and a few weak spots, overall it’s quite enjoyable and Batman generally translates quite well to an Anime style. The only thing I don’t think translated quite as well is that Bruce Wayne is generally shown in a Bishounen style, as in he has a more effeminate look to him which is very different from the very masculine style in western animation and comics. But aside from that, it was an enjoyable movie and a welcome departure from the traditional animation style without going too far into typical Anime philosophizing and introspection that plagued the recent Iron Man anime Rise of Technovore.
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