As the first major DCAU crossover, a sprawling three-part story with production values fit for a feature-length film, it’s no surprise that the episodes comprising World’s Finest were spliced together and marketed as a direct-to-video feature. As in any crossover, no hero can take dominance over the other, and so World’s Finest thrives on symmetries and character collisions and an undying spirit of one-upmanship. Only rarely giving way to dubious characterizations as a result of this preordained law of friction, World’s Finest stands as a testament to the complexity and stylistic immensity of the DC Animated Universe, accelerating its bloom into a colossal self-contained entity of intersecting narratives and interlocking characters.
The characteristically vivacious Superman opening bleeds into the now-crimson red sky of the redesigned Gotham City, its craggy skyline in canted frame before our viewpoint descends via dissolve into the city’s hazy, pitch-black underbelly. A shift from blaring, triumphant orchestration to intermittent rain and thunder is followed by another shift from a long shot overview to a more honed in shot of an unassuming antique shop nestled in the street-level blackness. As the shopkeeper closes up, Harley Quinn and the Joker, now revamped to look simplistically angular and more prone to garish cartoon poses and more flexible facial expressions, slip in and steal a jade dragon. We then cut to Batman and the police at the scene of the crime, trying to make heads or tails of Joker’s thievery.
This introduction to Batman and Gotham city, characterized by descent and mystery, segues into our introduction to Superman and Metropolis, now characterized by ascent and directness. Superman has to save Air Force One from terrorists in a grandiose scheme that couldn’t attract more attention if it tried, a crime that starkly contrasts with the puzzling and subdued thievery of Joker’s midnight escapade. Soon enough, Lex Luthor is abducted by Harley and the Joker, whose cartoon motions jut up against Luthor’s stone-faced sturdiness in a comical straight-on medium shot, and the major players are soon all introduced with ample contrasts divvied between each pair.
Lois Lane remains the pivot point, a character with no counterpart, who finds herself privy to moments of romantic insecurity and equally invested in both Superman and Batman as the story progresses. As S:TAS has developed, we have seen her and Superman’s bond subtly evolve, but this evolution is the accumulation of dropped hints and bits of foreshadowing as opposed to tangible marker points that trace a clear growth in the couple’s relationship. As Lois fumbles in an attempt to ask out the Man of Steel, she is presumably just as clouded on the issue of where they stand as we are, solidifying her as the most identifiable and perhaps most important character in the story. Throughout World’s Finest she becomes important to all of the other central characters, becoming the Joker’s bait and the object of Batman’s and Superman’s mutual affections while never diminishing into an objectified plot puppet. She retains her dignity through her unquenchable humanity, thanks in no small part to Dana Delaney’s impeccable voice acting and her exclusive privilege to the episode’s most naturalistic lines of dialogue (“Regale him with madcap tales of the nightlife in Smallville,” “burning, stinging iodine,” and her self-deprecating self-mutterings after she flubs her date attempt with Superman).
Batman and Superman, meanwhile, are subject to several mixes and matches with other characters and each other due to their dual identities. The first time Batman and Luthor meet they meet as business partners, Bruce Wayne of Wayne Enterprises and Lex Luthor of LexCorp engaged in a business venture, an encounter that adds a delicious dramatic irony to Batman’s eventual interrogation of Luthor in his high-rise apartment. Part of the story’s appeal is in studying how an outside organism transforms the status quo of his new environment; Batman has a transgressive disregard for legal boundaries that Superman could never possess out of care for his public image, making this interrogation scene the first time we have the pleasure of seeing Luthor truly afraid, his domain unexpectedly impeded upon by a being ironically more metaphysical than Superman. Additionally, out of costume, Bruce Wayne exacerbates Clark Kent, whom we see aggravated for the first time, through encroachment on his own territory on two fronts—his going out with Lois on Kent’s front and his vigilante exploits on Superman’s—a double-edged sword that neither identity can do anything about, as each character’s secret is at the other’s mercy. All throughout there are unexpected meetings between Batman and Superman, Clark and Bruce, and Bruce and Superman, each new encounter carrying with it its own surprising charms that engage our amusement while defamiliarizing our favorite heroes.
These character interactions are too numerous to list in detail or to do any justice to their particular delights, and the plot too capricious to trace point-by-point with any success. There are traceable patterns that persist throughout, however, that yield more dichotomous enjoyment and toy with the central theme of dualities between characters. For instance, as Superman and Batman grow more at ease with each other, due in no small part to Lois’s revelatory discovery that Batman is her boyfriend in disguise and the gradual evaporation of their knee-jerk biases and assumptions about each other, Joker’s and Luthor’s hatred for one another only escalates. While Batman and Superman are bound indefinitely by their heroism in spite of their differences, Joker and Luthor are hopelessly mismatched as anarchic force of insanity and uptight, methodical businessman. Their key differences are underlined in a few surprisingly thoughtful instances. For example, we know that Luthor is an entrepreneur with his company logo on just about everything who yet tries to sever all traceability to the crimes he pulls, marking him as duplicitous and hypocritical. Joker, while more brutal, is infinitely more honest about his entrepreneurship, stating that he likes “to personalize all my stuff” before taking to the skies in an enormous smiling aircraft that rains fire on the city of Metropolis.
With Batman’s and the Joker’s arrival in Metropolis, we are immediately privileged to sights so far veiled by Metropolis’ established schematic. As the series deals more in bold shapes and long shots and enormous spaces, there is rarely any room for idiosyncrasies. However, thanks to Batman’s gothic influence, we now travel to the clustered alleyway suburbs that house the Metropolis mob and a seedy strobe-lit nightclub called Rocker’s. Thanks to the spatial configurations of camera pans and zooms, each of these new environments has some proximity to an already familiar space; the mob sector on the city outskirts and Rocker’s close to Hobb’s Bay. Other new spaces include two restaurants, one on a 1920s style rooftop of sloping stained glass backdrops and stylized shadow play and another a ritzy, palatial suite encircled by golden archways.
The story is told with an adrenaline rush to accommodate all of the chance encounters and plot progression while still making time for show-stopping set pieces. Each part includes at least two high-octane action scenes, all bathed in some unlikelihood. Bruce Wayne’s bullet-dodging skills are daunting, not to mention all of the particulars of the third act’s cataclysmic hellfire. But it must be remembered that World’s Finest is foremost an adventure between two great heroes that has to be exciting before it can be a series of intelligent character studies, a thematically unified story, or an atmospheric visual tour-de-force.
Fortunately it is all these things and more, a fusion of seemingly incompatible elements that overlap into a succulent dish. Confounding ideas of heroism—both heroes’ approaches to doing right are selective, each concerning himself with areas that fall outside of the other’s radar, and both possess conflicting moral ideologies and equally self-important assumptions about the other—before unifying them, World’s Finest is euphoric on a gut level and uplifting on an ideological one. It ends with Clark Kent in silhouette looking out at Bruce Wayne’s plane bound for Gotham in the distance, capping World’s Finest with a bold, encapsulating image that concludes one story while looking ahead to many more to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment