B:TAS reviews: The Last Laugh

(1/19/09)

The Last Laugh offers one of the sharpest examples of the dichotomy that tends to exist in animation between writers and directors. The screenplay is worthless, a throwaway freelance job about a silly Joker ploy to flood the city with his laughing gas and reap the benefits of a mad and defenseless populace. Besides a few comic asides and rough exposition, the episode is all action: we see a lot of thieving, infiltrating, escaping, fighting, escaping and pursuing, and none of it really matters.

But the direction is something else. No, it is not Altieri's best work by a long stretch, but it certainly does a better job of smoothing out AKOM's characteristic eye-sore animation than most directors seemed to be capable of. He tends to nullify the pudding-like consistency of AKOM's character models by keeping it in rhythm with his bouncy and kinetic action scenes. Note his choice of a mid-level shot of the river, creating an extreme bit of dynamic one-point perspective, as Batman speeds to catch the Joker. When Joker slits holes in the trash-can in which he has trapped his foe, he does so with a playful, fast-paced urgency that produces snake-like dodges from Batman inside. The foundry climax is yet another example of Altieri's fluency in long-shot motion. The action flows with a deft rhythm as Batman is forced to navigate the many contraptions.

The other areas of production are a mixed bag. The sepia-toned backgrounds create the impression of an ordinary day while amplifying the sense of drab humidity that perfectly complements Joker's further contamination of the uninhabitable urban wasteland. Shirley Walker's score is instrumentally original in its combination of off-kilter accordion and percussion, but after a while becomes downright metronomic. It only deviates from the main theme to dabble into Batman's and Joker's respective themes, and the result is a pendular alternation that achieves less in setting the tone than in numbing it.

Ultimately, The Last Laugh feels otherworldly in its many visual curiosities, its infectious redundancy, and its uneasy mixture of bad comedy and straight-laced drama. Its garishness stems more from its unorganized and disparate storytelling than from any kind of standardized conventionality, and every bad joke or stray cliche sits alongside robotic clowns or garbage barge action scenes. It's a bad episode, but in the weirdly disruptive and unrefined way its various elements interlock, it's certainly worth a look.