I stumbled across Batman Ninja and had to click ‘watch’ because the premise sounded pretty fun – Batman, his enemies and allies are sucked back in time to Feudal Japan… and it’s exactly as crazy as it sounds.
Batman Ninja (Ninja Battoman) 2018
Mecha castles, monkey armies, katana fights, explosions – the Joker farming – it’s got everything, really.
Above the wildly bold strokes when it comes to the storytelling is what I thought was a really pleasing visual style and a fairly seamless integration of the CGI with the ‘hand drawn’ style; I really liked it and wished I could find images to show the full colour range of what the studio did, it was often beautiful.
Supposedly the English subtitles present quite a different story to what the original screen writer had in mind but for me, I didn’t feel like the film was meant to be a dialogue-heavy character study, there are few moments of introspection/reflection in any event – it’s mostly action scene to action scene, with the ante being ratcheted up nicely each time. And yeah, too many villains/allies get too little screen time but it works for me even so.
Aside from a pretty great Joker performance from Wataru Takagi, I also really enjoyed the character designs by Takashi Okazaki (Afro Samurai) and I’d recommend taking a look at this if you wanted to see what DC + Anime looks like (though it’s not the first time Japan has taken on Batman).
4 Stars
The Review Heap 