I don’t really know how to feel about Batman: Year One. Of the DC animated features, this one has stayed closest to its source material, and is almost a panel by panel reconstruction of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s seminal Batman tale, and yet something is still off.
Certain factors—the animation and the voice acting specifically—do the film a grave injustice. There seems to be an almost blurry gloss to the animation which made me at first believe that my glasses were dirty. Then I thought I had cataracts. Turns out the film exists in an almost dream-like cloud that almost resembles Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. The art itself also has a modern anime feel to it, and to that end the character’s faces rarely seem to betray any real expression. Moreover, the grit that Mazzucchelli injected into the artwork of the original is abandoned here for something more refined and antiseptic. The result keeps Gotham (and the film itself) from really coming to life. Gotham City is a major character, with all of its whorehouses, criminals, dirty streets, gothic structures, and oppressive architecture. Here, it’s just the city that Batman operates in; the only difference between this version of Gotham and Metropolis is simply a matter of geography.
Then there’s the voice acting. Bloodless is the only word I can think of to describe it. Everyone seems to be sleepwalking or stumbling through their dialogue, as if intermittently glancing to their watches to see how much longer until they get paid. Only Bryan Cranston, Alex Rocco and Jon Polito seem to have any fun or put any effort into their performances, while Katee Sackhoff is wasted in her role as Sarah Essen. I also have to single out Ben McKenzie and Eliza Dushku, both limited actors in the first place, as two factors that truly hold the film back. Both are absolutely toneless in their roles and are both deeply unconvincing. McKenzie does attempt to do more with his Batman voice but still seems outright bored and miscast. I can give him a little bit of a pass here because voice acting is very different than regular acting and it’s going to be hard to capture the manic voice of a younger Bruce Wayne still learning to be Batman; I can also give a bit of a pass for much of the same reasons to Eliza Dushku—whose Selina Kyle verges on having a Valley Girl accent—but in the end it really just sounded like they were simply reading lines on a page just for a check.
It’s important to note that as someone who grew up with Batman: The Animated Series, when I think of Batman I think about Kevin Conroy, and as much as I would love to hear Conroy voice Batman in the iconic dinner scene and climactic showdown with the SWAT team, Conroy would probably not be appropriate for the role. His Batman voice is a hot gravel baritone, edged by age, bitterness, and experience, and wouldn’t have been the voice of a twenty-five year old upstart.
Were it not for the exciting and kinetic action scenes and the engrossing story as it stood, the movie would have put me to sleep faster than a Quaalude and Ambien cocktail. The action is where the film feels truly cinematic in scope, choosing for fast-paced and acrobatic yet still plausible and easily discernible. The only failing of the larger action scenes is that the CGI mixed in is cheap, obvious and stilted.
Batman: Year One, the graphic novel.
Considering the short span of the movie (clocking in at barely over an hour) and considering the graphic novel is barely over a hundred pages, there really isn’t much more to cover. Batman: Year One works so much better as a graphic novel; somewhere during its translation into film it lost a great deal of its soul. It’s not a bad film by any means, but it doesn’t inspire the excitement of the graphic novel and it doesn’t aspire to its greatness either.
Read the book.
On another note, the Catwoman short film is actually pretty decent, artistically in the same style of Year One and voiced by Eliza Dushku, only this is written by longtime friend to Gotham City, Paul Dini. It’s definitely highly sexual—though not in an eye-rolling way like Judd Winick’s Catwoman #1—and its story is quick and exciting, and feels more alive in its brief fifteen minute span than Year One in its sixty-six minute duration.
Batman: Year One– 3 out of 5.
Catwoman– 3 out of 5.
