Batman: Soul of the Dragon

DC's direct-to-video animated movies are a curious proposition. From a technical perspective these 80 minute features struggle to meet the admittedly high standards set by the pillars of the company's best television animation - specifically, Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited. For an action focused series, one designed to be sold on home video in supermarkets rather than appear on TV for free, these productions routinely present as impoverished, both in terms of money spent and time afforded. Viewers who expect these DTV efforts to consistently scale up the free-flowing combat delivered by Joaquim Dos Santos' pit fighting Grudge Match JLU episode - broadcast on US television in March 2006 - will, more often than not, find themselves disappointed. 

Despite an enjoyable 1970s martial arts film framing, Sam Liu's Batman: Soul of the Dragon doesn't buck this trend to any significant degree. Action staging is cramped and robotic, almost completely failing to take advantage of a story that explores Batman's mystical self-defence training in the company of a number of characters created by the late, great Dennis O'Neil. Although functionally exposition, the flashbacks to this The 36th Chamber of Shaolin influenced drilling contains a fight so far beyond anything else in the rest of the piece - including every aspect of the finale - that it inspires sensory whiplash. Charged with defeating a buzzcut bruiser with only one digit, Kelly Hu's Lady Shiva launches into an attack completely unconstrained by the limits of a physical camera. The overbearing mediums that neuter elsewhere are utterly abandoned; Soul of the Dragon becoming unglued and exciting. The film even takes on the perspective of an index finger, hooking into a mouth to expose vulnerable gums and teeth. It's an inventive, beautifully boarded, sequence that, all too briefly, caters specifically to animation's strengths. 

Batman and Harley Quinn

Paul Dini and Chip Kidd's coffee table book Batman: Animated features an illustration by Bruce Timm in which the animator-cum-sequential artist maps out the sticking points their television series encountered when dealing with fastidious network censors. The image depicts a beefy Batman crashing through glass with his hand firmly around the Joker's neck. The Clown Prince of Crime has blown a hole clean through Bruce and, apparently, struck the freaked out child surfing on The Caped Crusader's enormous back. A naked, cigarette smoking Catwoman tumbles with them, as does a syringe, a crucifix and a bottle of XXX hooch.

Sam Liu's Batman and Harley Quinn, yet another supermarket shelf-filler from the once-great DC animated stable, seems to be a feature length attempt to get as many of these taboos onscreen; settling the score with the long-forgotten pearl-clutchers who wouldn't allow a beloved children's television series to function as a cheesecake smuggling device. As such Liu's film ranges from competent to excretable. 74 minutes of padded-out nonsense that sees Dr Harleen Quinzel reject what sound like snuff movie shoots to admire a striptease prompted bulge in Nightwing's bat-suit. Eventually this one-night stand teams up with a wonk-eyed Batman, hoping to put a stop to Poison Ivy's latest attempts to wipe out mankind, but not before Quinn has stunk out an airtight Batmobile with a series of spicy food farts.

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight

A disappointingly loose adaptation of Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola's Elseworlds comic. Sam Liu's Batman: Gotham by Gaslight ditches that piece's swirling sense of despair to knuckle down on the assembly of a time-shifted Bat family. The various Robins are drawn from the ranks of Dickensian pickpockets while Selina Kyle is recruited from a go-nowhere dalliance with a married Harvey Dent - an idea that (as far as I'm aware) hails from recent video game tie-ins. A killer stalks Gotham's streets, preying on poor, socially disadvantaged women. The city's police don't seem too concerned, they're more excited about an upcoming World's fair exhibition that, thanks to the slight budgets afforded to these straight-to-video features, looks more like a one-dimensional, MDF backdrop than a glimpse of tomorrow.

Gotham by Gaslight isn't a total loss however. Like Jake Castorena's recent Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, this static, stuttering, film comes alive whenever bodies are in motion, most obviously in a series of hand-to-hand confrontations between Batman and a brawny, invective spitting take on Jack the Ripper. These two bruisers manhandle each other, using crashing weight and directed blunt trauma to eke out any second of advantage. Better still though is the cabaret interlude that introduces us to Jennifer Carpenter's Victorian take on Catwoman, the lead singer / dancer for this music hall performance. Wider shots of this Can-can call attention to a sense of soulless reproduction present in the regimented backing dancers but closer shots, particularly a sequence where Kyle leads the petticoat choreography, offer an fluid exuberance otherwise lacking in Gotham by Gaslight.

Superman: Red Son

The trick of Superman: Red Son is that the film locates its hero in a specific time, place and ideology, allowing dramatic intrigue to arise from internalised decisions and actions rather than, say, an invading alien of the week. Comparable DC animated features exist in their own bubble realities; isolated incidents that make very little attempt to connect with anything other than whichever live action film Warner Bros is cuing up for a big screen push. Sam Liu's Red Son, adapted from Mark Millar's Elseworlds comic, is the Superman story told in broad, decade-spanning strokes, with the last son of Krypton cast as the living embodiment of the Soviet Union rather than the United States.

Red Son is, on some level, Superman stripped of the contradiction and compromise that a realistic reading otherwise imposes on the character. Portrayed here as the beloved surrogate son of Joseph Stalin, this agitprop Man of Steel explores his sense of messianic duty through direct, seismic leadership rather than street level heroics. Obviously, given this animated feature's country of origin, the technological utopia that Superman builds is flawed and, eventually, tyrannical but this Evil Empire framing allows a curious note to creep into this compromised saviour's interpersonal confrontations. Ironically, this secular Superman is often assessed by the human beings he encounters in terms best described as religious terror.

Unlike their caricatured American counterparts, cornered Easter Bloc citizens wither in Superman's presence, reacting, reflexively, as if they are being judged by an invincible, almighty power. Their presumption is always damnation, prompting either a garbled explanation of their actions or, simply, horror. The most striking of these unexpectedly human moments comes shortly after Superman learns of Stalin's purges. He journeys to a lead-lined Gulag finding malnourished, shuffling dissidents - the victims of his adopted father's all-consuming paranoia. Among the dead and dying is a two-storey pillory housing four broken, contorted bodies. To their side stands a guard, his face painted with a mix of blank obedience and bug-eyed terror. It's a fleeting moment in Liu's action-packed whole but then again what other, recent, image in superhero cinema better illustrates the chasm between these divine, inspirational personalities and humanity's pathetic attempts to emulate their overwhelming strength?

Justice League vs The Fatal Five

Justice League vs The Fatal Five aspires to be a movie length episode of Justice League Unlimited. The home video release ropes in voice actors from the classic TV series and Bruce Timm's clean, angular, art style to tell a not particularly interesting story about time-travelling criminals and the mental health worries of teenage superheroes. Aside from the above window dressing, the closest Sam Liu's latest comes to summoning up the vim of its antecedent is in the decision to build itself around lesser known characters. At its peak, Justice League Unlimited was a popped-out plunge into the DC back catalogue; twenty-minute gasps that dredged up a procession of heroes and villains to be pulverised by Dr Fight himself, series co-director Joaquim Dos Santos.

Unfortunately Dos Santos and ace collaborator Lauren Montgomery are both long gone from the DC animation team - the directors are currently booked for Sony's various Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse follow-ups - leaving us stuck with a creative team who churn out cynical, supermarket cartoons. At one point the DC animated universe was the go-to place for comic book histrionics and fluid action cracks. Now we're lumbered with an assembly line producing bumbling, misshapen features, each vid spiked with enough light swearing and pooling blood to avoid babysitter video classifications. Never mind that these additions often register as a creep's idea of maturity. Fatal Five's fight sequences (one moment of axe-meets-Lantern-ring excepted) are cumbersome and under-animated too. Rigid, plastic looking figures collide in a flat, centre space; world-shaking brawls executed with a clod's idea of invention.

Reign of the Supermen

Set six months after The Death of Superman, Sam Liu's follow up, Reign of the Supermen, gives us a Metropolis full of pretenders and facsimiles, each desperate to fill the shoes of the absent Man of Steel. These aspirants include a horny teenage clone, Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett's Conner Kent reconfigured as a grasping pop star in the Justin Bieber mold. His 'appearances' are not just your typical tabloid altruism, Superboy also turns up to film premieres and mixes in with crowds of adoring adolescent fans. These public pop-ups are micromanaged by his father-cum-manager Lex Luthor, here voiced by Rainn Wilson who brings his trademark man-on-the-verge-of-shrieking-mania to the role.

Screenwriters Tim Sheridan and Jim Krieg also punch up the Cyborg Superman's origins, marrying the biomechanical horror of the character to the micro-marked flesh of Jack Kirby's Apokolips. The creature's raw material, astronaut Hank Henshaw, perished in the previous film, frozen in the headlights of Doomsday's meteorite delivery vehicle. Moments from death, Henshaw ignored the pleas of his colleagues (including his wife) to do basically anything, instead preferring to sit smiling with the expectation that Superman would rock up any second and put everything right. Reign, a much more fluid and free-flowing episode than its predecessor, has fun working through this raving lunatic's disappointments. The animators warp his body and dimensions, filling the 1.78:1 frame with his screaming, mechanised face as he stomps around, searching for a powerless, party-in-the-back Superman.

The Death of Superman

Flat and soft where recent big-screen DC adaptations have gone for grunged-up and spiky, The Death of Superman is the rare animated film that manages to create a palpable void around its characters and situations, a death space that nulls attention. This incredible feat is accomplished both through slack, lackadaisical editing and a screenplay scrambling for the cheery irreverence of a Joss Whedon serial. Despite the grave pugilism promised by the title, an inordinate amount of the film's running time is set aside so we can churn through Clark Kent's big, coming out moment with Lois Lane. It's an underdeveloped plot strand that renders Lane atypically bovine while Kent summons up the courage to take off his glasses.

Presumably, these scenes exist to keep this Superman (abnormally inattentive and self-absorbed) from dealing with the film's rampaging threat, Doomsday. Naturally, all the film's best bits revolve around this invincible monster, from his bored pulping of small town policemen to the extra little step he takes after delivering a skull-cracking haymaker to The Flash. The simplistic, multi-camera style set-ups that leave two-thirds of the film feeling like an animated soap opera are abandoned for Death's centrepiece, a twenty minute fight between Superman and a hyper-evolved brute. You can feel thought and consideration bleeding into the film. Teams of animators thinking up new, exciting ways to stage collisions between two ostensibly invulnerable creatures, blowing all the work time and budget they saved up by keeping the first 50 minutes routine.

Batman: Year One

Perhaps aware that a great deal of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's original piece was gobbled up by the Christopher Nolan franchise (enough that, reportedly, at least Miller was cut a cheque), Sam Liu, Lauren Montgomery, and Tab Murphy's adaptation of Batman: Year One doesn't attempt to swell events with tacked on action spectacle. Instead we get a lean, mean war journal; bulletin events and headlines from the first twelve months of Batman's war on crime. A few dopey clarification lines aside, Miller's headache speak survives intact, dominating the film's mood and motor. Mazzucchelli isn't quite so lucky. The outline of the artist's figure frames remain, but they've lost their scratchy, sweaty quality. Likewise, the putrid colours of the newsstand issues are lost to pastels. Aside from Ed McGuinness's action figure drafts, these DC OVAs have struggled to replicate individual artistic ticks. Year One is no exception, but at least Miller's writing is allowed to pop.

Benjamin McKenzie reads Miller with the dull clip of total psychosis. A performance, and presentation, unafraid to portray a multimedia character thinking like a serial killer. Bryan Cranston synchronises perfectly with James Gordon, the actor incapable of giving any reading that doesn't throb with a wounded, conflicted masculinity. Cranston is adept at finding the dark, secret corners of married males - the light frenzy of leadership, or the cold-sweat panic of responsibility. Cranston gamely plays along as Miller's writing exposes the heroic Gordon in unheroic ways, creating flaws and imperfections that colour, rather than void, Gotham's human face of justice.

We've had many Miller adaptations in the last few years, but none of them, not even the Miller co-directed Sin City, have given a complete account of his beguiling, hysterical ability. Sin City deleted the abuse and illness that informed a lunatic like Marv. Zack Snyder's 300 forgot to acknowledge that Leonidas knew he was a fascist battling on behalf of someone else's democratic ideal. Miller's skill is that he can place a recognisable psychological state within the confines of comic reality. He invests his characters with fanatical drives and masochistic kinks that play like truth in worlds teaming with super-identities. This Batman then is the closest yet to full-Miller. Find his indelible mark in the lack of excuse used to justify Bruce Wayne's behaviour. There are no asides to contextualise scenes in which Batman promises to mutilate a criminal. Gordon is framed considering his gun while his heavily pregnant wife sleeps. There is no levity, just the suffocating desire to punish. Extremity of thought, as well as action. This is Frank Miller. He trades in seizure chivalry.

All-Star Superman

An abbreviated zip through Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's modern masterpiece. Incident and idea detailing in this All-Star Superman may be trimmed and lightly clodded in service to an action plot, but Morrison's super-engaged Man of Steel is otherwise beautifully accounted for. In applying, and emphasising, Superman's intellectual and emotional spectrum, Morrison arrived at a fresh, credible take on a character usually hamstrung by a goody-goody otherness. This Kal-El is curious and motivated, using his powers less as a reactive counter-balance, more as a means to explore and document. Despite a few bum notes on key beats - the Superman 2 tease in particular plays creepy - Sam Liu and the late Dwayne McDuffie's adaptation moves on the same keen toil as Morrison and Quitely's wonderful comic.