B:TAS reviews: On Leather Wings

(1/18/09)

It is with few other television shows than Batman: the Animated Series that I continue to revisit the series and notice little Termite Art tidbits that have previously eluded me. On Leather Wings is representative of this effect and of the series' guiding tonal and atmospheric norms, and concisely illustrates the formalist pleasures that lurk within every episode's hectic assemblage. It functions as a genre film so absorbed in its own clichés that they become cursory ingredients for an exemplary classicist entertainment. The screenplay lays part of the series' groundwork, but Kevin Altieri's direction, which pops and crackles and shoots off from an elaborate stylistic schematic, is what secures On Leather Wings as riveting expressionism and transgressive excitement.

It begins in the open expanse of the Gotham night sky, a police zeppelin hovering over the hustle and bustle of the city below and occupied by two officers, one nervous about what he believes to be a horrific creature undetected on the radar. What matters more than any of this back-and-forth prefacing is a preeminent shot of the blimp rising out of an ocean of clouds, already prefiguring the series' love of bold shapes and traditional compositions, and establishing Altieri as a master of pictorialism and large-scale sequencing. The Man-Bat's swooping down on the city is further connotative of this handle for large spatial relationships and already creates a bold visual contrast by way of literal and figurative descent from the liberating security of the open sky and the claustrophobic, jagged subspace of Gotham City, disorienting in the rapid tracking shot that imparts it.

The story rests on the catalyst of science overstepping its boundaries, but the horrors of On Leather Wings are more sharply metaphysical than the usual thought experiments of science fiction; the episode draws in its use of stylized silhouettes and demonic terror from, among other sources, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Murnau's Nosferatu. If the synthesis between Victorian terror and macabre visuals calls to mind one German Expressionist master, then the art-deco look of the city, street-level traipsing through all manner of shadowy spaces, and the socio-political backdrop wherein three departmental figureheads already find themselves deadlocked in a power struggle recall Fritz Lang's M, Dr. Mabuse films, and Metropolis respectively. Much of the series melds classicist themes and moral determinism with contemporary interest in psychological fiction, and On Leather Wings plants these seeds with its fixation on dual identities, broadly foiling one obsessed individual who carves for himself an alter-ego with another.

Cementing the beauty of the visual style are the abundant bells and whistles dispersed throughout the animation. There is the way the streak of light on the window of Langstrom’s lab tilts as Batman enters, denoting the starkly visible ramifications of the the smallest of gestures. At one point, Batman rolls a gas-pellet from a concealed space and the camera tracks it from a distance until it dominates the screen, at which point there is subtle framing shift to a more extreme angle that tracks its mirror trajectory. These nuggets of animation skill culminate in a complex moving camera shot that breaks the flow of static compositions and basic tracking shots, dropping the viewer into an impossible spectatorship position that whirls around a zeppelin while keeping up to speed with our hero, and then ending its seconds-long kaleidoscopic splendor with the whip of Batman's cape as the duo continue their voyage into the horizon.

On Leather Wings is an unrefined but completely self-assured masterwork that lets loose a barrage of unbridled creativity and that sets the tempo for the rest of the brilliant serials that comprise the grand achievement of Batman: the Animated Series.