S:TAS reviews: Blasts from the Past

We open to a garish utopian image, vegetation spurting up outside a high-tech lab facility. As we move into STAR Labs, we find that Emil Hamilton is the only researcher on staff, and after a barebones, incredulous catalyst—a top professor is foolish enough to tinker with alien technology and release a vicious arthropod monster—Superman chases the beast into Metropolis, on whose dreary sepia uniformity is plastered a pair of busy telephone-wire repairmen, the only visible sign of life in the city. Blasts from the Past is an atmospheric misfire, sacrificing any traceable conception of living, breathing places for humid vacancies and stock backgrounds. This insatiable opening is only the beginning of an extensively hollow forty-four minutes.

If there is any grandiose topic that must be inevitably watered down for the sake of a cartoon series, it is fascism. Jax-Ur and Mala seek to rule Earth with an iron fist, power-hungry inter-galactic terrorists out to domineer a fragile planet. But naturally the writers’ approach is ham-fisted, as only it can be. Among the many disagreeable inferences we are to draw from the first part is that the world is, for the most part, a peaceful place before Mala releases Jax-Ur from his imprisonment. Superman seems without any other obligations for the first fifteen minutes or so, and by the time he is finally ready to do something heroic, he restricts his focus to an alleyway bank robbery. It is as if Superman has no worthwhile ambitions, cleaning up petty crime as befits his Gotham City counterpart. It is only the emerging totalitarian takeover that can disrupt the Earth’s apparent utopia.

Once that takeover does occur, the Daily Planet becomes a microcosm of mass anxiety, and the UN becomes the shopworn symbol of the world’s collectivity. Five minutes at the most are allotted to Jax-Ur’s and Mala’s global usurpation. They have transported Superman to the Phantom Zone in faux-suspenseful plot contrivance, and the ensuing illustration of how the fascist state emerges is a straightforward affair of wreaking havoc followed by mandate signing. Naturally Superman arrives at the last minute to lead the two tyrants on a wild-goose chase and back into the Phantom Zone from whence they came. Given the demonstrative failure of this attempted lambaste of fascism in superhero cartoon form, I find it curious that the producers’ returned to it again and again, more than likely because the story of dictatorial overthrows and suppression of freedom has one of the most deeply embedded prototypes in popular fiction. Thankfully the creators would find ways to morally complicate the topic in Justice League.

All trace of recognizable humanity is stripped from what is largely a story of tireless exposition. Superman only once appears as Clark Kent; his true role is in playing the pundit for world liberty, going from puppy-training Mala to spewing out platitudes about caring for the Earth’s inhabitants. Storyboarding is at an all-time low. Never mind the perpetually robotic facial features and body language of Hamilton and Superman; anytime the directing crew needs to exhibit an emotion (usually anger), they resort to hyperbolic shortcuts, an exaggerated canted frame or a character spreading apart his or her limbs to brash extremes.

That said, I maintain that not one episode of Superman is a total disaster; Blasts from the Past is full of convincingly violent fight scenes; regardless of their stiff animation and awkward physics, the force of the blows is always aptly conveyed and their unfolding often incorporates lengthy stretches of well-defined urban space. The attempted cracking of Superman’s skull constitutes one of the most painful, and by extension memorable, instances of unique sound design in the series so far. Part two is the superior half if only because there is rarely a respite from the action; in such a meandering go-nowhere episode, the show-stopping brawls are usually the most salvageable portions of the story.

Finally, not all of the exposition is dispensable; we do learn a little bit more about Kryptonian mythology, and the Phantom Zone now becomes a key emblem of that mythology, another trophy for the Fortress of Solitude, which is finally named as such by Professor Hamilton.

TNBA reviews: Old Wounds

When one thinks of strong female characters in the DCAU, the list only really extends to Lois Lane, Harley Quinn, and possibly Hawkgirl of the Justice League. Most of the others run into some trouble, tending to be of secondary importance to the male characters, or in some way dependent on them. Some don’t even earn the privilege of secondary status; they are sex objects, plot devices, or embodiments of generic female character traits. Even a character as long-lived and iconic as Wonder Woman could not acquire a third attribute after her amusing stranger-in-a-strange-land exoticism and exaggerated masculinity.

Batgirl is the worst example of the series’ perpetual marginalization of women. She began in B:TAS as a naïve, idealistic upstart who dived into costumed heroics when her father needed her and came to be characterized by her romantic longing for Batman. The seeds were planted for character development, but they only bore fruit belatedly. Come TNBA, her character would be a literal-minded sidekick sporting the occasional nudge of comic relief and the voice of Tara Strong, who assisted in the minimizing of the character’s dramatic importance by lacking anything distinctive in her impassive vocals that have since become a dull standard for femininity in animation.

Old Wounds transports us to the temporal gap between B:TAS and TNBA, where we learn about why Dick abandoned one mantle to take up another and why Barbara Gordon decided to fill his shoes as Batman’s plucky sidekick. Even though Barbara is in a relationship with Dick and her new partnership with Batman is posited as one of the reasons for his departure, she seems dispensable to the larger goings-on. Dick and Bruce are interlocked in a father/son clash of cosmic proportions. Barbara can be nothing more than moral support, a damsel in distress, or a supplier of reaction shots. Her role should be of primary importance, not sidelined.

The actual catalyst for the breakup, provided after a mere one or two minutes of laying the groundwork with Dick’s college graduation and Bruce’ relative indifference, is a heated incident in which Dick’s disillusionment is brought directly to the surface. Batman has pinned a hoodlum named Connor to the wall of his apartment in front of his family. Connor’s small child looks on in disbelief, echoing Dick’s own bewilderment at Batman, who exhibits plain disregard for the man’s family as he unnecessarily brutalizes him. This effective showstopper ends the first act with plenty of time to spare, most of which pertains to a negligible plot by the Joker that has more to do with deflecting the story’s accumulated angst than with posing an actual threat.

The tendency for television to turn every chunk of programming buffered by commercials into a self-contained narrative with its own climax turns damaging here; Fogel can’t help but make the first act the tensest and most suspenseful of the three, and the actual second-act cliffhanger comes off as simpleminded by comparison. Dick rescues Barbara from falling off the highest point in Gotham, single-handedly combining one of the oldest superhero clichés with Barbara’s objectification as a helpless woman in need of a savior.

The moment that Dick finally walks away comes well after we get the gist of things. The dramatic impact is further deflated by Batman’s inability to act as Dick’s dialectic counterpoint. Dick flings accusations and telegraphs his intentions from the get-go, and Batman seems adrift in his own ultra-pragmatic world of overturning the latest Joker scheme. It can possibly be argued that Batman’s seeming disinterest in anything that transpires is further fuel for Dick’s anger, and yet the ending seems to nullify all of the charges leveled against him.

To contextualize: Old Wounds is structured as a flashback. The old Robin has just finished explaining this story to his replacement. And so naturally one expects the ending to construct some kind of relationship between the events of the past and those of the present. At the same time, one would imagine that the can of worms opened by this story, the uncomfortable moral light in which it places the series’ eponymous hero and the dialectical split between two costumed crime-fighters, each possessing the same willingness to do right, would not so quickly be shut. After all, what is the point of a tale with such visibly long-lasting reverberations if not to stand as a near-permanent alteration in the lives of those involved?

As it stands, the ending seeks to destroy the moral ambiguity that the narrative has taken so long to explicate. Dick and Tim stumble upon Connor, who explains that the joint efforts of Batman and Bruce Wayne have helped him turn his life around. Though it is a heartwarming scene when taken on its own terms, Fogel regretfully exaggerates its importance, positioning it as the end-all penitence for Batman’s sins and restoring Dick’s faith in his old mentor to the extent that the last few shots imply a jolly reunion.

So much of Old Wounds rings true, and yet it is told with such ham-fisted artifice, hollowed out characterizations, and moral grandiloquence that the whole enterprise ultimately crumbles. As a half-successful, faintly convincing telling of an essential tale, it provokes only the most lukewarm of responses from me.

TNBA reviews: Animal Act

The Mad Hatter makes for such a sinisterly self-assured crime lord that it is some shock that he had his roots as an awkward, submissive, sympathetic little man who espoused love instead of greed. Even after plunging into the depths of madness, he sought after a platonic fantasyland, acting on desires not criminal but childlike in nature. He was an oxymoronic fusion between scientific prowess and fantastical illogic, his great technological achievement directed towards wafting away reality in favor of his own imagination.

Alas, he took the first misstep in The Worry Men, a passable yarn that proceeded too mechanically to reflect the mind of Jervis Tetch. Though his intention was ultimately to achieve the isolated utopia of self-indulgence that has always been his goal, he did so through common thievery, as if his deliriously warped mind could fashion no more creative a scheme. In Animal Act, the limits of his creativity extend only to clownery, and the mind control that has symbolized his compulsion to shape the world in his image is reduced to villainous gimmickry. How ironic, too, that the Hatter’s devolution as a character corresponds to a redesign that renders him even more socially debilitative—hunched over and sickly pale with ghastly yellow eyes. As a visual specimen he cries out for interpretation, answered by the writers with second-rate circus tricks.

Animal Act’s structure matches each act to a set piece, beginning with a gorilla chase, progressing forward to a skirmish with two bears, and culminating in a circus tent spectacle where all the carnival misfits congregate to do battle with our heroes. Each set piece is buffered by an appearance by the incognito Mad Hatter, poorly disguised as one of the clowns at Haley’s Circus. As a whodunit mystery, the episode lacks the jazzy spontaneity and red herring freewheeling of A Bullet for Bullock, preferring instead a pre-written rubric that telegraphs the answers from the beginning.

If screenwriter Hilary Bader does seek to counteract the more immature elements of the story, it is in the unearthing of Dick Grayson’s childhood in the presence of the still-touring Haley’s Circus. Acting on the false principle that evocations of a character’s mythological history equates to an increase in artistic legitimacy, Bader draws on the big-top community as a well of nostalgia over which Nightwing fondly reminisces. Naturally, this sense of longing is nothing more than a way to convolute the mystery by establishing a suspect with emotional ties to one of the detectives. Batman implicates Miranda as the likeliest culprit; Nightwing defends her on the merits of childhood friendship.

Once the mystery is solved, this manufactured tension all but evaporates, leaving Bruce and Dick with nothing else to do but amicably pay a visit to the circus as spectators. It is quick-fix episodes like Animal Act that make one wonder how any character, from the Mad Hatter to Nightwing, keeps hold of his character-defining traumas and disturbances for too long. Such ruses make the belittling moniker of ‘action cartoon’ an acceptable label for a series that should strive for something greater.

TNBA reviews: Cult of the Cat

Catwoman’s transformation from morally troubled kleptomaniac with a wildlife activist slant to a full-fledged femme fatale with nary a moral concern is both beneficial and problematic in varying respects. Beneficial because it delivers her from the preachy tepidity of animal rights crusades; problematic because it hollows out her character into something unbendingly amoral, an almost ghoulish abstraction who never fails to get her way, even when cornered by multiple opponents. The love affair between Batman and Catwoman that seemed plausible but unlikely is now jettisoned as a ludicrous impossibility.

Cult of the Cat places this new hedonistic, thrill-seeking and self-serving Catwoman front and center in a superfluous thriller involving a cult of cat-worshipping, blood-lusting zealots out to get her, either for the purpose of her bodily sacrifice or her conversion. Naturally Batman gets caught up in the chase, trading didactic aphorisms in between punches as he attempts to help Catwoman worm her way out of her mess. For the most part, the first two acts are breezy action fluff, the cult barreling onward like minions in a brainless action flick and every supposed pause a setup for a more explosive surprise. The incipiently irksome animation recedes in the wake of non-stop bravura storyboarding, so that one’s sense of animation quality is gradually displaced by a passive enjoyment of ceaseless movement, fluid or not.

Unfortunately this all comes screeching to a halt when Catwoman is captured by the cult and confronted by its leader, Thomas Blake. The story, and the devious allegiances and flagrant lies on which it rests, is ultimately boring and transparent. When Batman and Catwoman do an iteration of the same morality play they have been doing since The Cat and the Claw, the only apparent rearranging of their dynamic comes with Catwoman’s dispositional change from morally conflicted to morally indifferent. Batman, apparently unable to keep from investing his hope and trust in someone so perpetually dishonest, becomes the unlikely victim of a not-by-any-means unforeseeable double cross.

A third act gladiatorial fight with a giant, mutated cat monster doubles back to the brainless action fun of the first act, but it trades in fast-paced kinetics for subdued spatial confinement. If the prospect of a concentrated fight in an underground arena seems promising, that is only because fixed locations are usually accompanied by worthwhile visual décor. Without anything particularly grabbing to justify such an extended sequence—the surplus of analytical editing growing particularly tiresome—the fight reads more as a videogame boss battle than a high-stakes act-closer. The only integral information nested within is Catwoman’s obligatory betrayal of the cult to come to Batman’s aid.

By the time she commits a third backstabbing reversal of allegiance, escaping to Paris with a vast sum of jewels stolen from her former captors, it becomes apparent that her playful sociopathy is here to stay, if of course we didn’t reach that conclusion in the episode’s first few minutes.

TNBA reviews: Critters

Batman as a character has survived hundreds of different incarnations spanning several decades. Some fans appreciate the character and the DC franchise for the versatility that accompanies constant reinvention, while others are slightly more closed minded. In recent decades, Batman has epitomized a popular flavor of psychological anarchy, excess darkness and realism, and anti-authoritarian coolness. When something like Critters pops up daring to merge American Gothic placeholders for rural America with outrageous biological experimentation, in the result yielding stampeding insects and a barrage of verbal and visual puns, then many fans react as if insulted or slighted. To them, the tonal exclusivity of Batman’s universe rules out such scenarios unconditionally.

I am of a different mindset entirely. Versatility is key not only to the enduring fascination, but also to the accessibility of the DC Animated Universe, and challenges to the internal stability of Batman are posed all the time, both in terms of continuity and atmosphere. In addition to the obligatory continuity errors that crop up from time to time, there are questions of whether visual redesigns make a dent on believable narrative continuity, or whether the immense technological disparity between the world of Superman and that of Batman mars the realism of either, or how the Batman of Justice League can possibly be the same as the Batman of Batman: the Animated Series, and so on. As far as atmosphere goes, the range of genres and storytelling modes would seem to destabilize what many fans perceive as a fixed state of dark realism.

Critters is a difficult episode because it defies categorization and doesn’t appear to market itself as a unique genre piece or comic escapade. Insofar as Farmer Brown is an unambiguous bad guy who is out for revenge and as Batman and co. are out to stop him, Critters is a typical villain-of-the-week offering with no obvious fourth-wall breaks or similar meta-textual veneers. On the grounds of character motivations or interactions, suspense, pacing, etc. Critters wavers between bland conventionality and flat-out incompetence. From an immediate transition between a genetically modified cow’s rampage and the ensuing trial that condemns its engineer to lose all research funding to an out-of-nowhere stampede of havoc-wreaking praying mantises, Critters does little to nurture believability or suspense, and the collective dullness of the Bat-family never quivers.

But it is not at a loss for conceptual aplomb, taking its bizarre foundation to even more radical extremes. If the fact of a genius biological engineer who just happens to be a gaunt farmer with a hillbilly daughter isn’t enough to disarm the viewer with originality, or at the very least queerness, then there is a smorgasbord of other things that will. From Farmer Brown’s artificial farm boxed into a giant offshore silo to a talking goat that breaches the defenses of Police Headquarters, Critters is almost uncomfortable in how many unpredictable turns it takes. Fiddle and blues guitar fill in the rural horror on the soundtrack while TV Western actor Peter Breck calmly and authentically channels Joe R. Landsdale’s distinguished genre-specific dialogue.

The backlash against Critters isn’t entirely a reactionary outrage over its refusal to play by the rules; it is stiltedly directed and very poorly animated, all while preferring spectacle to characterization and nuance. But as spectacle, Critters is exceptional. It offers sights and sounds that defy all sense, and on a first viewing, no matter how egregious it may appear to the mortified viewer, I would gambit that it is impossible not to follow it with bewildered curiosity to the very end.

TNBA reviews: Mean Seasons

Revenge narratives are the meat and potatoes of superhero cartoons, and Mean Seasons is yet another tale of a self-appointed victim out to wrong her victimizers to add to the batch. The best of such tales paint sympathetic profiles for ostensible lunatics, while the worst find security in dehumanization, in the process following banal action-adventure formulas. However, on a scale that has as its extremities apathy and intimacy, Mean Seasons simply doesn’t make sense. It dabbles in conventions and furnishes unconvincing character motivations for its narrative springboards, while at the same time faintly speaking up on the behalf of the antagonist, a once aspiring model who was chewed up and spit out by youth-obsessed executives.

Judging Mean Seasons on the merits of its plot, terms like ‘adequate’ and ‘middle-of-the-road’ may come to mind. As a character exploration it’s often unsuccessful at reconciling psychology with artifice. Aside from some deft visual metaphors and an effectively pitiable ending, Calendar Girl’s enduring image is of a hyperactive, cliché-waving cartoon, ever finding an opening for a verbal affront to the shallowness of the entertainment industry. As a story of revenge, it’s simply too confused and contradictory to register as either a success or a failure. This explains why its real successes are almost all a matter of peripheral subtext or comic suggestions, many of which undermine the story but almost always for the better.

One would expect Mean Seasons’s indictment of popular culture and all the superficialities that govern it would have its firmest basis in the pathos ignited by the industry’s mistreatment of Paige Monroe. Heart of Ice and Appointment in Crime Alley take similar approaches in their respective condemnations of corporate greed, and various other episodes rely on the personal vendettas of the unjustly maligned to garner our hatred for organized crime and political corruption. Given that Calendar Girl is mostly a plot vehicle, however, the episode’s assault on media executives and fashion shows and the like is, in actuality, strictly anti-pathos, if anything scathingly and hilariously satirical.

From GWB’s television broadcasting expo with its programming lineup of shows about modeling school and a skateboarding cop to a Jurassic Park reference that eventually develops into a drawn-out action sequence, screenwriter Hilary Bader freely lifts what she pleases from the then-contemporary lexicon of pop culture, all of it intended to expose some form of hypocrisy that has taken root in the businesses that dictate our cultural consumption, not the least of which, of course, is Hollywood. Calendar Girl’s goons, meanwhile, come across as some kind of feminist revisionism of camp, replacing uniformed women in skimpy outfits, as seen in Cold Comfort and The Ultimate Thrill, with equally subservient muscle-bound hunks.

Brimming with satirical digs, film references, and gags of the eye-winking variety, Mean Seasons compensates for its dramatic shortcomings with a penchant for abrasive thematic details. While some claim the main plot to be incompetently silly, the infectious silliness that oozes into cracks of the story is anything but incompetent; in fact Mean Seasons’ pervasive comic absurdity, manifest in these aforementioned details, is calculated for a certain rhetorical and deconstructive effect that it pulls off without a hitch.

S:TAS reviews: Where's There's Smoke

For all of their virtues, Apokalips…Now! and Little Girl Lost seem to have put a near-permanent end to the Metropolis of A Little Piece of Home and Ghost in the Machine.Superman’s instantaneous traversals of space and the surfeit of citywide disasters often appear to diminish the stature of the city, which in the process takes on the dimensions of a playground. In some episodes, however, Clark Kent’s investigative reporting competes with the usual superheroics for our attention, and in the process Metropolis expands into an uncharted sea of underhanded deals, political oversights, mob mobilizations, and so forth.

Where There’s Smoke marks the end of these pulpy thrill-rides, and from start to finish it’s ridden with suggestive dialogue and comedic tidbits and moody ellipses. Volcana, the pyro-kinetic who is the episode’s putative villain, drips sensuality with the same ardency that she commands her powers and harks back to the femme fatales of Hollywood lore. Harvey Cohen sustains the innuendo with dollops of steamy big band jazz that accompany select scenes, maintaining just the right air of playful seduction. This character undercoating, together with Clark Kent’s suspicions as he wanders the deadly streets of nighttime Metropolis, provides a film noir gloss that, in its implicit paranoia of surreptitious operations and dealings in the dark, poses as a perfect setup for the episode’s eventual transition to hi-tech, politicized science fiction.

It turns out that there is a third party, a renegade offshoot of the government that took Volcana from an institute where she was learning how to control her powers, and that forced her to carry out orders against her will. Suddenly, we have left the hazy mysteries and black-and-white moral polarities of film noir and have now entered a head-on engagement with political conspiracy that expresses forthright skepticism of the nationwide political infrastructure that finds itself at odds with Superman’s basic humanist ideology. Unlike in similar episodes in which we find ourselves sympathizing with a so-called villain because of his or her suffering at the hands of a third party, Where There’s Smoke presents as the culprit neither a corporation nor the mob, but a faction of the government.

At the same time that Where’s There’s Smoke points forward to Justice League Unlimited in its interest in government conspiracies and other forms of corruption, it also keeps one leg firmly grounded in parody and pastiche. Even more impressive is that it blends its parody with its political agenda to fashion a pretty bold critique of the Marvel Comics universe, a target that would again crop up in Batman Beyond’s Heroes. The paranormal institute that housed Volcana as a child standing in for the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters, Hilary Bader argues in her screenplay that such a place would be inevitably soiled by government regulations and interference. While this is being explained between Clark Kent and the doctor, Bader even throws in a brief exchange that comments both on the ignorance and misguided hatred of the American public and on the deception perpetuated by government higher-ups.

Furthermore, Kurt, the leader of the organization, has a counterpart in S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury. Yet while the latter is unmistakably noble and a chief example of the companionship that exists between superheroes and the government, the former is a manipulative egomaniac who stands firmly at odds with Superman’s ideological coda. While the aforementioned Heroes does a more thorough job of dismantling the tacit laws that govern the Marvel Comics universe, Where There’s Smoke remains a joy in its skeptical polemic against two of that universe’s heroic strongholds.

Most of the episodes that follow Where There’s Smoke involve interplanetary excursions, enormous superpower brawls, and other such explosive and fantastical material. Where There’s Smoke is the series’ last deliberate genre piece as well as the last appearance of Metropolis as a fully developed character in its own right. Though often overlooked, it deserves our deepest attention for marking the end of an era in the DC Animated Universe and for doing so with intelligence and pizzazz.

S:TAS reviews: Little Girl Lost

Little Girl Lost opens with Superman in a mode of alienation scouting through a cavity of space in the hopes of finding some remnant of his people. Almost five minutes are spent in a limbo of the universe, decorated with stars and asteroids, and then on an abandoned planet, as Superman wanders slowly, listlessly, and almost hopelessly. The score is soothing and somber and, with the gradual emergence of the ravaged planet Argos, powerful in communicating the notion of the galaxy as graveyard of haunted subspaces. Superman finds one survivor, whom in the very next scene we find soaring the sunny skies of Smallville in a sweeping pan across a gloriously disorienting landscape that hammers home the bewilderment of the experience of flight.

Little Girl Lost ends with the completion of a videogame objective, wherein space is effortlessly traversed and human stakes are ignored in favor of brisk action. Soon after the initial images of atmospheric grandeur, we find ourselves trapped in a stage-by-stage, connect-the-dots spy thriller, Supergirl no longer a stranger to Earth basking in its unknown wonderment, but a perky youngster eager to solve a mystery. Suddenly all shortcuts about how to convey gender and adolescence are embraced without a second thought. As if drawing from some theoretical crossbreed between Dickens and sci-fi fan fiction, Granny Goodness (delightfully played by Ed Asner), a mainstay of Darkseid’s echelon of evildoers on Apokalips, collects runaways and lost teenagers and dupes them into becoming her tech-savvy minions. Meanwhile, Superman and Lois Lane act the part of curmudgeons out to deny Supergirl, who goes by Kara, and Jimmy any fun, leaving us with popular fiction’s perennially unconvincing stereotypes of teenagers, adults and the supposedly irrevocable line that divides them.

In the vein of The Cat and the Claw, female heroes and villains are treated with special curiosity that denies them any sense of dignity as their own characters. Granny Goodness commands a squadron of ‘Female Furies,’ a gang of vicious warriors banded together solely on the basis of their gender. Supergirl is Superman-lite but with female sex appeal; instead of being afforded her own unique characterization, the writers give her the unexplained schoolgirlish desire of emulating her manly and heroic ‘cousin.’ As with the early appearances of Batgirl, the episode is anchored by the patronizing concept of a young woman awkwardly trying to live up to her adult male counterpart, but while Barbara Gordon acted on impulses and motivations tailored especially for her character, Kara has all the distinguishable qualities of an imperfect clone. Little Girl Lost is essentially the story of how Supergirl comes to be like Superman, and right before hesitantly solidifying her achievement, she reassuringly says to herself, “You always wanted to be a hero.” Given the mystery of her origins and the truncation of story information detailing her assimilation on Earth, the questions I’d like to know the answers to are ‘why?’ and ‘since when?’

These questions are suppressed by axioms about the recklessness and idealism of youth, the end-all justification for why Supergirl is the way she is, so that more time can be spent on the Darkseid subplot. Unlike Apokalips…Now!, a transformative episode for the series that permanently altered continuity and daringly mingled the tenets of grand epic storytelling with tender humanism, Little Girl Lost is inconsequential as a segment of the Darkseid story arc and worthless as an account of human feeling. Darkseid, though never a complex character, can no longer fulfill his obligations as a basic archetype, retreating from the gnashing evil of Superman’s amoral counterpart to a placid warlord content to play villain of the week. His plan to destroy the Earth all but contradicts the long-term schemes we learn about in Legacy (which are also implied in Apokalips…Now!), and does little more than conveniently present Supergirl with an arbitrary mission, the accomplishment of which will validate her worth as a new addition to Earth’s growing roster of super-powered heroes.

Besides the possession of a lot of visual strengths—in addition to the opening scenes there are plenty of fastidiously animated fights, moving background shots and periodic instances of exceptionally good storyboarding—the only positive purpose Little Girl Lost serves is to rest as a continuity bullet point.

S:TAS reviews: Apokolips...Now!

Superman: the Animated Series has never been particularly complex as character drama; its complexity stems instead from its interweaving of massive set pieces and how it exploits the immensity of the geographical expanse that serves as its backdrop. The best episodes are tour-de-forces of crosscutting between various spaces, each housing its own character interactions or action scene, and the sum of all these plot strands translates into an intricate urban network that usually carries political, sociological, or mythological baggage.

Apokolips…Now!, a two-part episode awash in mythology, lacks the adroitness or formal ingenuity of Ghost in the Machine or The Late Mr. Kent. Rather it announces itself as a masterpiece by closing the spatial gaps that comprise the Metropolis for a single, concentrated vision of chaos, and then creating an even larger intergalactic system of interplanetary diplomacy that cuts the minutia and idiosyncrasies we’re so accustomed to down to size. After Apokolips…Now!, Metropolis looks decidedly small compared to the added forces of Apokolips and New Genesis, each of which has its own richly detailed history and full-fledged design scheme. In this regard, Apokolips…Now! opens the door for imaginings of the universe itself as a network of multifunctional dimensions and planetary units, which in turn lays the groundwork for Justice League and for the image we now have of the DC Animated Universe as a gigantic, all-encompassing phenomenon.

Ignoring the episode’s importance as a precursor to greater things to come, it is also a triumph of Manichean epic and apocalyptic vision, indulging its moral extremities without a trace of self-consciousness and wearing its Biblical allusions on its sleeve, not to mention its blatant titular pun on one of American cinema’s most thunderously nightmarish war films. Given Superman’s history as a salvation figure for the masses and the series’ history of crafting mythical archetypes, Apokolips…Now! somehow feels genuine even though it borrows from a compendium of different texts. It charges head-forward into the restless waters of the portentous epic and filters every plot contrivance and line of potentially campy dialogue through fully committed writers, artists and voice actors, so that when Darkseid, for example, predictably seals his betrayal of Bruno Manheim with the declaration, “and so you are: a king of fools!” it can’t arouse anything but our gravest attention.

Dan Riba dresses it up with extravagant backgrounds and dynamic poses, almost all of which hark back to Jack Kirby’s brand of simple but bold illustrations. Almost every shot is a feat of careful craftsmanship. The first alone includes both a tilt down and pan across a hi-tech police outpost, a shift from static monumentality to horizontal action that succinctly encapsulates Riba’s brilliance at framing and camera movements. In the climactic battle scene, one of the most ambitious any cartoon series ever attempted, pans are actually distinguished from tracking shots (a distinction rarely attempted in animation), as Riba creates a semicircular camera trajectory to mirror Superman’s turning his head to witness the coming onslaught, replicating the feel of a camera’s rotation. The rigorous designs and direction are also thematically pertinent; the first battle scene lingers on a shot of a ravaged, debris-strewn street and the first part ends with an act of nuclear warfare, both premonitory signs of the coming apocalypse, all as the red color schema that subtly infuses the first part slowly becomes more saturated.

If Apokolips…Now! has a flaw, it is the overload of mythological information and rapid augmentation of new characters. Part one’s expository centerpiece is a ravishing widescreen historical overview of both Apokolips and New Genesis via Orion’s Mother Box, nuggets of comic book knowledge cropping up rapidly with little time for adjustment. When Orion, who only moments ago crash-landed on Earth, solemnly tells Superman that he is Darkseid’s son, already coloring in the cold and objective alien history with dramatic content, it is difficult to attune our emotional reaction to the grave tenor of the acting and score. The expansion of characters, information, and set pieces almost threatens to overwhelm the human aspect (promised at the outset by Maggie Sawyer’s hospitalization), but a last-minute bravura brushstroke shockingly yanks us from the delirious swarm of stuff and into a moment of deep and intimate human feeling.

The climax of part two has Superman crucified and paraded through the streets of Metropolis as Darkseid announces the impending dictatorial takeover of the planet. In the face of such heavy-handed symbolism pointing to Superman’s individualistic role as Earth’s savior, inspector Dan Turpin leads an uprising that puts a populist spin on the Biblical tale of Christ’s suffering and death. Superman is saved not by divine intervention but by the actions of an ordinary man, and in the midst of this celebration, which entails a squadron of New Gods prepared for battle, Darkseid, in a matter of seconds, vaporizes Turpin without leaving a trace of him behind.

Suddenly the notion of apocalypse has transferred from an avoided global catastrophe to a very real and piercing human tragedy, as Fogel and Riba transition from an enraged Superman at his most Herculean pounding away at Darkseid’s abandoned vessel to a still, serene funeral rendered with the utmost authenticity. The site modeled on a real cemetery and the Hebrew verses sung by an actual rabbi, Turpin’s funeral is a model of reverence that ends in a visual rhyme that complements the end of part one. To the lyricism of a wistful piano, Superman stands solemnly over Turpin’s grave with the same emotional burden as Orion and says, “Goodbye old friend; in the end the world didn’t really need a Superman, just a brave one.” It is a line that veers on the edge of platitude but that makes all the sense in the world.

As the episode closes, there is a dedication to the great comic book artist Jack Kirby, whose artistic sensibilities rub off everything in the episode, who is responsible for the creation of Darkseid and the New Gods, and whose personage had been channeled through Turpin’s character throughout the series. It is a metafictional conceit that equates artistic integrity to everyday courage, Superman’s mourning of a fellow hero standing for Timm and company’s mourning of a fellow artist. The humility that Timm exhibits whenever he acknowledges Kirby, one of his key inspirations, becomes Superman’s humility as he downplays his own virtues to honor the heroism of a simple, but courageous man. It is this very humility that completes the picture of Superman as a Christ figure, his superhuman power giving way to an all too human love for his brother.

This scene is a radical tonal departure from the body of Apokolips…Now!, which consists of so many operatic confrontations and colorful action sequences, and yet it is all the more poignant for it, reminding the viewer of the very human reality of death in the face of so much escapism. Superman: the Animated Series bravely flaunts its genre underpinnings, here in the most histrionic genre of the space opera, but only on the condition that we don’t scoff at its often scoffed-at precepts of undiluted heroism, and in Apokolips…Now!’s illustration of human loss it more than accomplishes this mission.

S:TAS reviews: Warrior Queen

In Warrior Queen, Hilary Bader retreads a lot of the same ground already covered by Paul Dini in his exemplary The Main Man, an intergalactic adventure that comically accommodates outrageous science fiction phenomena into familiar types and genres. But unlike Dini’s loose, fun simplemindedness, Bader deviates from the whimsy of her subject into a bloated lecture on the ills of dictatorial rule.

At first, the episode strikes a cord of Star Trek-like sci-fi silliness, filter-feeding us the political and marital dynamics of a planet called Almerac in campy declarations that spell out in no unsubtle terms that fight and flirtation are one and the same. Maxima is the hotheaded, boy-crazy queen, De’Cine the power-hungry monster who strives to conquer her (the one prerequisite for matrimony), and Sazu her duplicitous right-hand maiden. In the effort to obtain a mate, Maxima goes to Earth in the hopes that Superman will defeat her in battle.

This amusing premise is cleverer on second glance, given that Maxima is simultaneously a hormonal woman hungry for a lover and a masculine warrior ready for battle. Her stint on Earth concludes with a bit of hilarious irony, as after her girlish excitement that Superman has defeated her, she immediately knocks him over the head and forces him homeward upon his refusal to be her betrothed. Other smile-inducing moments include Maxima’s nonchalant assault on several forthcoming, salivating males, Angela Chen’s soon-to-detonate sit-down with Maxima on the morning news, and a grouchy old couple straight out of Bewitched who provide a running commentary on Superman and Maxima’s confrontation. The last of these yields the funniest moments and most closely approach the genius of The Main Man, as the last corny aside cleverly undercuts Superman’s idealism and most concisely encapsulates Bader’s wit in approaching gender (Double Dose is rife with similar examples).

Sadly, Superman’s naïve idealism extends to his ultra-moralistic spiels about just rule and fair governing in the episode’s latter half, only by that point the subversive humor has been all but abandoned. When De’Cine’s mutinous takeover develops into a matter of serious concern, the story has capsized, the campy fun has worn off, and all that’s left is obligatory action. The giant monster Superman and Maxima must defeat bears comparison with the creatures from The Main Man, although the kind of raucous humor on display in those battle scenes is nowhere to be found here, Lobo’s gasp-inducing exhibition of alien-skinning a far cry from Superman’s lengthy tactics. Curt Geda is at his most by the numbers in the ensuing scuffles, replete with silly affronts against the minimal standard for cartoon physics and an overdose of stiff long shots.

Just when all the fun seems drained out of what is now a synthetic political thriller, Lobo comes blazing into Maxima’s palace on his flying motorbike. But Maxima, having learned the ways of responsibility and leadership and now lacking her warrior-like edge, is now all hormones, and this last-minute cameo does little to remedy the third-act nosedive.

TNBA reviews: Over the Edge

Over the Edge is in some ways the DCAU’s most horrific nightmare, because even as a dream it permanently taints how we perceive our heroes in their own reality. It is the fallout of an inevitable collision between two factions unable to coexist, the most perverse effacement of Batman and what he stands for, and the ultimate vision of apocalypse made manifest in any superhero cartoon.

It takes but one misstep in embedding a flashback into its dream narrative in order to open the show with the total destabilization of the established Batman mythos, Gordon and Batman locked in violent pursuit interspersed with the obliteration of several series touchstones before the Bat Cave as a whole is left a ravaged wasteland. The purpose of this opening, in addition to its throat-grabbing shock value, is that it almost dryly states outright that the conflict is irresolvable, and that there can only be a progression toward cataclysm, not reconciliation. In this sense, the only-a-dream structure is forgivable, because perceptive viewers are alerted outright that there is no other logical way out. And yet in depicting the dream in conventional narrative mode without a surplus of egregious surrealist techniques makes us buy into the reality of the dream world, so that what we take seriously what it has to say about our characters and observe how the truths presented bleed over into the real world.

After this fireworks opening is a momentary relapse into flashback, where we see Barbara Gordon knocked off of a skyscraper into the Gotham abyss, a sly cut across to her unsuspecting father in a squad car, and the inevitable, and all too symbolically pertinent, collision. Gordon sits in the street with Batman overlooking, inviting a reading of the scene as a mirror inverse of the Wayne tragedy, a depiction of a father with his dead daughter in his arms. Just as Batman turned his personal vendetta against his parents’ killer into a war on crime, so does Gordon immediately direct his rage-filled eyes toward vigilantism. Yet unlike the breadth and anonymity of the underworld, Batman towers above the city as the vigilante, the indisputable fosterer and propagator of all masked heroes who dwell in Gotham.

At the center of this dualistic reading is the reality of Batman’s culpability. At the helm of TNBA is a grim Batman whose cold-heartedness the writers often dubiously employ as an attractive benchmark of cool, anti-hero behavior. There is nothing to smile about as this streak in Batman that we often implicitly take for granted becomes grounds for his arrest, his having spent years coolly betraying his most trusted companion inside the law by systematically preparing his daughter for combat missions. Of the three comrades that Batman has taken under his wing, Dick and Tim were in need of a father figure because their parents were taken from them. Examining his relationship to Barbara under a similar lens, the situational ethics are less clear-cut, Batman’s assumption of the role of surrogate father housing the subliminal action of wresting her away from her real father. By the time we learn of Bruce’s romantic tryst with Barbara later in DCAU history, the morality becomes even more mystified.

With Gordon going the obsessive route of Batman, and in the process casting a dark shadow on our hero’s own ‘noble’ quest, Over the Edge soon enters into apocalyptic territory, with Bane, now infinitely more intimidating than in his debut, as the foreboding harbinger of destruction. The climax, a metaphorically overstuffed three-way fight to the death, is less shocking than it is visceral, an apotheosis of everything the TMS animators ever learned about fight animation. Beginning with an eerie dual-purpose funeral, proceeding to turn the Bat Signal from a beacon into a searchlight, and even throwing in a surprisingly suiting Vertigo homage, this reckless but fastidious third act is as full of buried stakes and rampant symbolism as any action climax I’ve seen in either film or television.

And then Barbara wakes up. This is a character who has been relegated to quips and comic relief since the beginning of TNBA, and one might criticize her objectification in Over the Edge as well, a mere catalyst who sparks a dramatic reshuffling of Batman’s and James Gordon’s relationship without any observance of her own character. The scene that follows her awakening defuses these criticisms and also initiates a rethinking of the events witnessed in the dream. If the credulousness of the portrayals of Batman as a manipulator of the young and Gordon as going too far in his rabid initiative for vengeance is horrific, then Barbara’s scene with her father makes us reconsider this horror as born of our own marginalization of her character, as the war waged between her two guardians is one that largely factors out the reality of her own choices. As Barbara comes forward with her confession, she takes on the burden of responsibility implicitly placed on Batman, and as Gordon accepts and respects the freedom she has been granted as an adult, we learn that a future in which he might revoke the trust he has put in Batman and be driven to madness is an impossibility.

This dream episode winds up telling more about our heroes than most episodes do. If Over the Edge is already a masterwork, albeit a disturbing one, for its tendency to throw our idealistic images of Batman and Gordon into flux, then the new image offered of Barbara in the last minutes, as a character every bit as tortured as these two men and as a master of her own destiny, elevates it to an even higher status, ameliorating our fears without eradicating them and forever changing the way we think about this series.

TNBA: The Ultimate Thrill

After the contemporary flair of Torch Song, The Ultimate Thrill launches us back into the impossible-to-pigeonhole period nebula of B:TAS, clearly taking place in modern times but making do with subject matter almost entirely out-of-date. Roxy Rocket is a retro-outfitted aviator who used to star in series of adventure films (in the same way the entire Batman mythos owes part of its existence to old live-action serials, they often play key roles in these similarly serialized cartoon series) who took her job as a stuntman to daring extremes before directing her fearless talents to underworld freelance. But what endears her to us more than her nostalgic evocations is her unadulterated sense of fun.

What proves fascinating about The Ultimate Thrill is that it expertly, if unintentionally, divides its audience’s allegiances between two equally attractive characters. One may sneer at it on first glance for being a catalogue of stylish chase sequences (to which one may inquire why this is in anyway a bad thing), but on closer inspection it proves itself as a succinct recapitulation of the central character dynamic in The Cat and the Claw without any of its pseudo-political baggage. The opening of The Cat and the Claw is one of the sleekest and most sexually charged pursuits that ever opened a superhero cartoon. Unfortunately, that belabored two-parter soon dissolved into bad feminist pedantry. The Ultimate Thrill picks up where that episode left off, deploying the same zesty sensual overtones in its chase sequences and maintaining the same level of energy the whole journey through. The result is a glorious crescendo that culminates in a transfixing innuendo-laden sequence of raw sexual excitement that compares the euphoria of a near-death experience to that of an orgasm.

What makes The Ultimate Thrill successful is that Roxy is a bubbly and likable character whose unsuppressed love for fun is foiled against her employer’s debonair villainy. Because Bader frames her run-ins with Batman more as play than as pursuit, it becomes apparent that finally apprehending Roxy is analogous to cutting short a great party. Do we side with Batman’s moral rationale or pray that Roxy stays one step ahead in the name of uproarious fun? I doubt it can be said that Batman in good conscience should remain on Roxy’s phallic flying rocket with a smirk on his face as it approaches the side of a cliff for no better reason than to demonstrate his ability to play her game, but it allows both her exhilaration and ours to persist for just an instant longer before the perfect stopping point, by which time we have all been adequately satiated. It is Batman’s most entertaining compromise.

It’s worth a reminder that the sexual sparring only suffuses life into set pieces that are bedazzling enough without the extra charge. One of the best takes place in an underpass, where Batman, flying by means of his tailor-made jetpack, attempts to subdue his opponent. The action takes place from several vantage points, thanks to Batman’s losing control in the highly congested thoroughfare, and extreme angles that replicate the look of a wide-angle lens shot distort the tunnel into a bizarre rotunda. These expressionistic moving spaces are inter-cut with Batman’s own subjective vision as he plummets through eighteen-wheeler storage trucks, and the entire sequence is cleanly but fiercely edited to yield one of the most successful of all of the series’ action extravaganzas. The other chase scenes carry the same vigor, be it through the keen feel for aerodynamics or the gorgeously composed cityscapes against which they take place.

TNBA reviews: Torch Song

An oft-disparaged episode, Torch Song emulates S:TAS’s Target with less success, abandoning its camp overtones and spending more time rallying our hatred for a warped sexual predator. TNBA again proves that it is, more often than not, lamentably inadequate at constructing for its villains anything other than bloated, breast-beating despair or psychotic shrillness. In his casting sickly, beady-eyed stares and stalking his prey with burly, hunched shoulders, Garfield Lynns is postured as an obsessive geek to be feared and derided from the outset. Unlike the similarly twisted Lloyd Ventris of See No Evil, who had soft, redemptive qualities and sieved into the rhythms of his tale, Lynns is a blunt object that deflects all closer inspection, jarringly jutting out of an already dissonant cluster of events.

Because character arcs are nearly impossible to develop across twenty-two minutes, Lynns begins as a real-world lunatic with a Madonna-whore hang-up on pop sensation Cassidy and swiftly turns into a more cartoonish lunatic, less human and more spectacular in his efforts to claim her as his own. As a character, he operates as a pendulum, swinging between the drive for total control over his idol and the destructive impulse to eradicate her. And like Baby-Doll and Mr. Freeze before him, Firefly is under the impression that igniting a citywide apocalypse equates to some form of therapeutic or spiritual cleansing, a leap that has only remotely made sense when applied to Freeze’s nihilistic misery. That several episodes seem to arrive at fusion bombs and other doomsday devices indicates a laziness on the part of the writers, who ride every villainous motive to this hash-brained outcome without possessing the verve to try something with more personalized stakes.

One might expect from Torch Song some type of thematic intermingling of subject matter and key motif, in this case fire, ever signifying passion or destruction. It partly fulfills these expectations, but unlike Heart of Ice, where ice and snow functioned as touchstones of pristine beauty that lyrically extended the sadness of the protagonist to the episode’s décor, Torch Song doesn’t seem to do much aesthetically with fire, indulging it for little more than bad puns or brusque figurative standbys for jealousy and contempt. I can give the episode credit for traipsing from an image of fire as a cheap entertainment draw-in to something more elemental and psychologically imprinted, but this is more than likely accidental and isn’t enough to significantly alter my evaluation.

The most significant aspect of Torch Song, then, is its swerving away from the period vacuum of the series that precedes it, which was an amalgamation of styles from various decades integrated for widespread purposes, to appeal more to the nineties. Cassidy is a nightclub superstar whose performances rely more on pyrotechnics than on her vocals to sell them and who embodies all the offbeat, sex-symbol mania of the eighties and nineties music scene. Unfortunately, Torch Song does little in the way of saying anything incisively amount music or the industry, nor does it even feel obliged to partake in any fun, referential pastiche in the vein of a director like Godard or Tarantino. Instead it stumbles through a misshapen pattern of daily investigations and nightly skirmishes, until culminating in a weak-willed jab at the music industry and a bit of faux-poetic psychological trauma.

TNBA reviews: Love is a Croc

Outsiders and misfits are impelled to cling together, even if the basis for the affiliation is little more than the surface trait of being different. Baby-Doll, now a hotel clerk, finds herself drawn to Killer Croc because she mistakenly believes that, even though his murderous behavior could not be anymore apparent, he is wrongfully accused and marginalized by a conformist society, a point that the writers incredulously attempt to make plausible through the brief prejudicial asides delivered by miscellaneous pedestrians that follow Croc’s outbreak from a courthouse. This line of thinking is soon overturned when Croc’s charisma as a dockside ladies’ man negates any of his chronic inability to relate to other human beings. Baby-Doll ends up as the only one of the two who has any real claim to being an outsider and, as we soon see, the only character with any claim to being remotely developed.

Love is a Croc almost remedies Sideshow’s silly echoing of classical tragedy in its third-act plea for sympathy, having us believe he deterministically kills and thieves because it is who he is and can’t be changed. But it falls short by falling on another extreme of creating for him a profile of irrevocable, unfiltered brutality without indulging in the comic or human potential he showed when voiced by Aaron Kincaid. As a non-character, he is partially culpable for this episode’s destabilization when it was at least showing some moderate sophistication as another exploration of Baby-Doll’s regression into a romantic, television fantasy, here translated into a misfit Bonnie and Clyde duo. Croc reveals himself as so caricatured and goonish that Baby-Doll’s loneliness may as well be chalked up to her sad existence as the only developed character in a world without a capable righter to elevate plight to the level of tragedy. Without sturdy characters to situate her, she winds up shrill, pathetic and psychologically disfigured beyond all sympathy or comprehension.

Further prohibiting any fluidity or sensibleness from seeping into the story is the absence of Batman, or any of his new team, as voyeur, sympathizer, and audience stand-in, a function he tends to serve in episodes featuring villains that find themselves in dire need of emotional or psychological help. Unlike in Baby-Doll, where Batman aptly fulfilled all of these roles, here, as in many TNBA episodes, he is more stolid and strictly functional; the disparity between his appraisal of the events and our own, given shape by our exclusive access to the turmoil of Croc’s and Baby-Doll’s underground hideaway, becomes too large for us to identify with him, which, in effect, prevents us from adequately identifying with anyone. Batgirl, ever by his side, is as one-note as she’s ever been. Baby-Doll remains the protagonist, but our interest in her struggles diminishes with her troupe of stock supporting players whose job it is to generate her conflict and direct its trajectory.

Love is a Croc can only boast a surprisingly awkward pairing that seems initially exciting on the grounds of its own arbitrariness. It also exemplifies the downsides of the series’ revamp between B:TAS and TNBA. Starting with Batman’s brawl with Croc in the Gotham streets, Love is a Croc makes a show of being strung together more by its fight scenes than by its story-focused junctures, allowing every minor transgression to propel the ever-fragile state of affairs into a brainless action sequence. The worst B:TAS episodes owe their poor quality to miscalculations of character or social commentary of the most patronizing sort. Not one of them exhibits such thrill-happy, knee-jerk escalations of chaos that yield plot developments so perplexing and meaningless that it’s straining even to muster up a sympathetic response to a character’s total emotional devastation.

TNBA reviews: Growing Pains

Growing Pains assumes the gravitas of a feature-length film through its economical storytelling that subsumes temporally condensed, but emotionally charged sequences that tacitly fill in narrative gaps and wipes that elide all that is unnecessary with greater efficiency than straight cuts or dissolves. Growing Pains has neither the time nor artistic license for lengthy introspection or extended lyricism, but in its watercolor backgrounds and midpoint interludes that distill a humble social awareness it comes close to the poetry of the very best youth films by Nicholas Ray and Dennis Hopper, and echoes them thematically in its handling of muddled father/son relationships and in its inevitable convergence on catastrophe.

The premise is that Robin has become obsessed with a lost, amnesiac girl tentatively dubbed Annie out of a combination of pity, empathy, and teenage romance. Dini and Goodman do little to mollify her straits, starting the episode out with a biker convoy of would-be rapists who encircle her in an alleyway and bait her with degrading come-ons. Robin comes to her rescue in a triumphant sequence of adolescent valor that immediately dissolves into awkward intrigue for her. That Annie’s confused loneliness corresponds to Robin’s own murky childhood as a mobster’s son and that Robin is for a rare moment alone in his actions as a savior immediately conjures expectations for romance, or at the very least deeply involved friendship, and these expectations are immediately dashed by a signal from Batman roughly akin to a sudden tug on a dog leash. As in Never Fear, Batman is a domineering, unsympathetic and constrictive father figure that has multiple unflattering parallels in the story. Robin is the only one of the two seeming to carry a spark of basic human feeling for Annie, who is filtered almost completely out of Batman’s radar of more pressing priorities.

Robin’s nocturnal trek through the ruination of Gotham’s poverty-stricken sectors, arriving soon after Annie is revealed to have a father (in a riveting sequence at a bus station that utilizes intersecting lines of both architecture and processions of people to characterize Annie’s frantic aloneness), is the centerpiece that, in a unique instance, encourages time for reflective pause. For all of the cartoon archetypes that Annie fulfills, especially those attributable to anime, Dini and Goodman are earnest about making us believe her as a human being, and these somber observations of poor people thematically associated with Annie and strewn about crumbling tenements do wonders to evoke the kind of lamentation one would only expect to find in more challenging works of art.

The irony of the lengths the writers go to make Annie feel more human than the rest of our cast is that she isn’t human at all. Though it may be a disappointment to some that the plot takes a turn for the fantastical when the story seemed so focused on real-life issues, the revelation that Annie’s father is Clayface escalates the drama exponentially, raising relevant and almost unanswerable questions of ethics that make the proposed antagonist a man of justifiable principle and Robin, the proposed protagonist, at a loss for how to reconcile his gut-feelings to a sadly mixed-up reality that can’t quite account for his easy solutions. We agree with him in his beliefs that Annie deserves to be treated as a human being and Clayface as a monster, and yet neither one can be successfully argued with any degree of closure.

The paroxysmal finale in which Clayface reabsorbs Annie, whom we find was merely an extension of his will before she blacked out and became autonomous, not only pays homage to Akira and its ending of similarly self-destructive elemental chaos, but also stands as the DCAU’s definitive moment of moral limbo. The boundaries that govern the definition of murder and the rights of an organism (and this counts for both Annie and Clayface) are blurred irrevocably, resulting in a denouement of grown-up frustration that marks both a coming-of-age story in the best sense and an indelible sign of maturity in a series currently undergoing a watershed period of boundary-pushing and rediscovery.