Bat­man: Gotham Knight is a direct-to-DVD pro­duc­tion from Warner Pre­mière, intended as a back-door pre­quel to the fea­ture film Bat­man: The Dark Knight. Warner Bros. has tried this tac­tic before, and will again. 2003’s The Ani­ma­trix was a planned inter­lude in The Matrix fran­chise, enjoy­ing exten­sive involve­ment from film­mak­ers the Wachowski Broth­ers. Com­ing soon is a motion-graphics ani­mated ver­sion of Alan Moore and Dave Gib­bons’ graphic novel Watch­men, pre­ced­ing the forth­com­ing live action fea­ture film adap­ta­tion (no doubt Moore, who has long since divorced him­self from his past work for Warner Bros.’ DC Comics, has a few choice words for this development).

That’s a good look for you, Mr. Wayne

Like The Ani­ma­trix, Gotham Knight is a port­man­teau films, the prod­uct of mul­ti­ple writ­ers and ani­ma­tion teams. But in con­trast, Gotham Knight is only tan­gen­tially related to its sis­ter film, The Dark Knight. A pair of detec­tives fig­ure as char­ac­ters in both, and the gang war that per­co­lates in the back­ground of The Dark Knight is the dri­ving inci­dent behind many of the Gotham Knight tales. But the short films (mostly in a Japan­ese animé style) vary wildly in qual­ity and comprehensibility:

• “Have I Got a Story For You” (Shou­jirou Nishimi) — A pack of skate rats tell tall tales of the Bat­man, until the real deal shows up. One of the best of the lot, with a unique hand-drawn ani­ma­tion style, mixed with a lit­tle CG.
• “Cross­fire” (Futoshi Higashide) — Two detec­tives are lit­er­ally caught in the cross­fire of a gang war. Suf­fers from par­tic­u­larly awful dialogue.
• “Field Test” (Hiroshi Morioka) — Bat­man receives a new toy from Lucius Fox that works a lit­tle too well.
• “In Dark­ness Dwells” (Yasuhiro Aoki) — Guest-starring two vet­er­ans of Batman’s rogues’ gallery: Killer Croc and Scare­crow. Some of the best ani­ma­tion, but the story is incomprehensible.
• “Work­ing Through Pain” (Toshiyuki Kubooka) — Bat­man, shot in the gut, strug­gles alone just to get home. He has hal­lu­ci­na­tory flash­backs to his spir­i­tual train­ing in the art of over­com­ing phys­i­cal pain. He recalls how his teach­ers rejected him for his impure moti­va­tions (to enable his revenge plan, not to attain higher spir­i­tu­al­ity). This, one of the best sto­ries, leads directly into:
• “Dead­shot” (Jong-Sik Nam) — …one of the worst. A mas­ter assas­sin (a bla­tant rip-off of the char­ac­ter Bulls­eye from Mar­vel Comics’ Dare­devil) tar­gets Lieu­tenant Gor­don. A really lame con­clu­sion to the collection.

Why so serious?

Offi­cial movie site: www.warnervideo.com/batmangothamknight

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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