“I never seen him before, but I’m like I so know who this is,” a teenage skateboarder proclaims in "Have I Got a Story For You", which serves as the first entry of the impressively animated if uneven six-part anthological comic book come to cinematic life in the new DVD release Batman: Gotham Knight.
Of course, the caped crusader to whom the teens are referring is none other than Batman, and in a series of escalating stories, the group tries to outdo one another as a sort of fanboy version of a “your mama” joke. While it's admittedly a rather weak way to open the episodic work, from a narrative perspective it makes perfect sense to ensure the audience’s thirst for good, old fashioned storytelling by listening to several tall tales in preparation for the film’s far superior yarns to come. And indeed, much like a perfect mix CD made by a friend who knows your musical taste well, the six talented Japanese anime-experienced filmmakers responsible for Gotham Knight know how to excite viewers as the film climbs steadily, building upon itself to become worthy of the formidably high bar that Batman enthusiasts have set for any entry in the series.
Broken into a half dozen distinctive chapters, each of the tales in Gotham Knight was created by an entirely different director and screenwriter. Now while in traditional live action form this may be distracting (and some critics referenced the failure of Four Rooms in their Gotham reviews) and it's also been pretentious (such as in the overly long Paris je t’aime) this technique can provide a unique visual take to differentiate the chapters and better serve the story, such as Kieslowski employing a different cinematographer for each individual segment of his brilliant Three Colors Trilogy. Granted it’s not in the same league as Kieslowski nor should one compare apples to oranges — or more precisely an anime take on a comic book with some of the best foreign films of the 1990s — but the bottom line is, it works in the exact same way, to avoid getting viewers lost in the shuffle of too much stimuli by switching up the visuals, not just for novelty or to pander to the ADD attention spans most filmmakers assume those of us reared on MTV, video games, and Choose Your Own Adventure books have, but to better the experience considerably.
Article comments
1 - Chris Bancells
Sounds like an interesting take on the Bat. Thanks for the review!