S:TAS reviews: The Main Man

Towards the latter half of Batman: the Animated Series, Paul Dini ascended the threshold of outrageous comic escapades, trading in his dramatist pen for one that freely, joyously crafted bubbly screwballs, sitcoms, or broader pastiches, all lightly grounded in the dingy schematic of Gotham City and the most notable of which starred Harley Quinn, the loosest screw in an already unhinged world. Throughout Superman, he would stretch the boundaries of his comic creativity to assimilate the fictional extremes of a universe inhabited by aliens and magical imps into the familiar iconography of popular culture.

Lobo is the first of the bizarre characters that Dini plays with, and here he takes a morally abhorrent monster and makes him a grungy biker punk with a tough guy dialect that amusingly substitutes presumed alien slang for English vulgarities. His forceful sexual appetites and allusion to his eradication of his own species are mitigated by his bloated machismo and interchangeability with any alpha male ruffian in a leather vest. His stark white skin and red eyes do little to remove him from the all-too recognizable pop stereotype he so aptly occupies.

Often in science fiction, strange alien worlds are unconvincingly familiarized. Dini’s method of molding his strange alien specimens into clichéd roles renders the vast cosmology that Superman has at his fingertips less a stretch of fertile, anthropological soil and more a melting plot of clashing stereotypes humorously assigned to the least physically likely candidates. Perhaps he knows that no fictitious extra-terrestrial will ever be as strange or as wondrous as can be imagined, so instead it is best to fuse together qualities both recognizable and unrecognizable in the interest of comedy. If what makes Lobo so funny is his biker persona, then the story derives humor from pairing him with Superman so that they are whisked along in an intergalactic buddy picture.

Part one calls attention to Dini’s debasement of potentially brilliant life forms, by cutting from Dr. Hamilton’s query about the undiscovered intelligent life in the universe to a close-up of Lobo’s garish face, belching before he sparks a rambunctious barroom brawl. Another fun transition: before being subjected to the role of straight man, Clark Kent dabbles in some wry fun at Lois' expense. Calling to mind that Superman is himself an alien creature made familiar—he is physiologically and ideologically anthropomorphic—he and Lobo represent two ends of a spectrum of human behavior, and the only non-human attributes shared between them are their superhuman powers. Their confrontation is one of the most geographically expansive of all fight scenes, traversing the Metropolis police station, LexCorp and Hobb’s Bay, with quite a few stops in-between.

If part one is primarily a fun affair, then part two is more remarkable in lending augmented gravitas to the notion that the series progresses in a fastidiously planned sequence. Soon after Brainiac arrives to destroy the Earth and is thwarted by the Last Son of Krypton, whose uniqueness as the last of an extinguished race is an object of great attention, Superman is then abducted by a creature called The Preserver, who has set out to collect the last survivors of every extinct species. Both episodes are thematically linked, and each ends with a shot detailing the progress of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, which can be said to be a converse of each collector’s respective trophy chambers.

The Main Man is the more successful of the two, reluctant to dwell on dramatically bloated mythologizing and more content to be an escapist adventure. Even if part two is a never ending series of encounters with alien combatants each more grotesque than the last, Dini keeps the sparks flying between Lobo and Superman, milking every skirmish for maximum comedic effect. And even in the midst of all the comic chaos, there are a few surprisingly lovely moments, some of ephemeral beauty—as when Superman is reinvigorated by the rays of an artificial sun—and some that wink to comic book fans (one of these off-the-cuff references reemerges a series later for a breathtaking display of the creators’ imaginative tying together of seemingly loose continuity strands).

From beginning to end, The Main Man feels a lot like Dini, after having been suppressed from writing such a delirious romp for so long, vigorously letting loose and volcanically erupting out of a much-too-long hiatus from exercising his screwball muscle. Again in the secure realm of his forte, he shows no sign of running out of steam.

S:TAS reviews: Stolen Memories

It just dawned on me the biting succinctness of Superman’s episode titles. A Little Piece of Home and The Way of All Flesh transgress the confines of titular summations to add meaning to their respective stories. Stolen Memories is the best of the lot, a two word phrase that says more about Brainiac’s moral atrocities than any panoramic shot of Superman standing in the midst of a planet’s charred refuse. The being that has decimated worlds and civilizations is the only one privileged to their memories; the expansive perceptions and histories of the departed are to Brainiac quantifiable information. These cultures have none to carry on their legacy save an artificial agent.

Of course Superman is the exception to the rule, and whenever he is depicted as the Last Son of Krypton, his role takes on special Biblical significance. If Luthor is Superman’s arch-nemesis, then Brainiac belongs to Kal-El, the perennial Messiah figure of comic book superheroes. This is a person different from Clark Kent, the farm boy of pure values, and Superman, the bold icon of abstracted good. Kal-El is the loneliest of the three, the only one of his kind, and if Superman bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, then it is Kal-El who bears Krypton’s legacy on his.

If Stolen Memories isn’t a great episode—jerky character models and mechanical fight scenes abound—then it can at the very least be commended for sparking one of the great adversarial character dynamics. It is no great feat to pose two goliath figures of power against each other, insert a smidge of shots that basically convey longing and sadness, and then pepper the by-the-numbers screenplay with plentiful faux-dramatic lines that have all the blunt mythical implications of a climactic, over-saturated Star Wars exchange. But it is an adequate introduction to Brainiac the artificial intelligence, the series’ ambassador of science fiction horror.

The triad of Superman nemeses consists of Luthor, Brainiac, and the soon to be introduced Darkseid, and starting now and persisting all the way to the end of Justice League Unlimited, the DC Animated Universe will concern itself with the conflicting agendas between these three foes, each of whom offends a distinct part of Superman’s core person. The two common traits they all share are their vile opportunism and their underestimation of the others’ vile opportunistic impulses. In Stolen Memories already Brainiac and Luthor have forged a deal, the conditions of which Brainiac, and surprisingly not Luthor, has supplanted for his own ends.

Stolen Memories ends with the Fortress of Solitude in its infancy, at this point nestling the glowing orb that encloses the memories of Krypton. Not a single episode of Superman: the Animated Series passes without charting unknown regions of his theoretically infinite universe.

S:TAS reviews: The Way of All Flesh

If John Corben is a heartless mercenary, whose lawful punishments are never the equivalent of just retribution, and whose imprisonment equates to an unending procession of hedonistic delights, then surely he and Luthor are ripe for comparison. Both commit horrendous acts of villainy within the security of evasive corporate and political strongholds, and in subjecting his fellow terrorist to a state of permanent sterility for the sake of Superman’s elimination, Luthor reveals himself to be just as inhuman as the monster he has created.

As Corben’s innate malevolence makes him unsympathetic, his shrieks of rage and brash soliloquies qualify as something more than mere human drama; they speak to Luthor’s insurmountable amorality. Corben has refused to incriminate Luthor, and yet the CEO of LexCorp, believing himself to be above ‘honor among thieves,’ detachedly molds him into a pawn. If stripping away a man’s humanity hardly bores into Luthor’s conscience, then it is logical to infer that he does not put much value on the warmest of human qualities, preferring instead man at his least feeling. While Corben’s yearning for the senses makes him an undoubtedly human creature, his ravenous consumption of privileged prison food is certainly bestial. There is little doubt that Luthor’s devouring of exquisite foodstuffs on his private yacht is intended as symmetry.

What is most appetizing about The Way of All Flesh, more so than its furthering of Luthor’s and Superman’s rivalry and the amplified sense of danger and suspense that rarely accompanies similar stories of creation turning against its creator, is the concentrated awareness of Metropolis as labyrinthine, futuristic jungle. Superman’s first encounter with Metallo begins on an elevated train station, the surrounding buildings coated with an enticing array of whitewashed pinks and greens that casually remind the viewer of the city’s splendor. The prolonged sequence, which eventually arrives on a highway resting in the center of an agglomeration of indecipherable, convoluted industrial structures, calls to mind that Seigel and Shuster originally named Metropolis for Fritz Lang’s landmark science fiction masterpiece of the same name.

It is worth noting that Luthor’s cruelty has been established at great length before, and that much of Metallo’s tale draws from Batman episodes, not the least notable of which is Feat of Clay. But because Superman is a series more concerned with spectacle and bewilderment, it need not necessarily be slighted for a lack of nuanced storytelling, a quality it refreshingly ignores for simpler sensory extravaganzas. If one is to adopt the great critic Manny Farber’s perspective, Superman may as well be analogous to the sprawling fastidious canvas of unpretentious action films, while Batman is more akin to overambitious psychodrama and White Elephant grandstanding. The Way of All Flesh is more notable for its tactile action than for its story, and note that is not at all a barb at what I consider a suspenseful loose canon of a narrative.

As electrifying the collisions are between the ideological Superman, the slimy Luthor, and the unhinged Metallo, the flexibility and magnitude of the third act fight animation is the episode’s real star.

S:TAS reviews: Feeding Time

It is safe to assume by this point that Superman: the Animated Series is far more preoccupied with action sequences than its predecessor. Batman had so many format-benders, suspense pieces, and psychological thrillers that clearly the now established structure that incorporates an initial confrontation in the first or second act and then a more elaborate showdown in the third was not always the norm. Though it can of course be argued that the restriction of having to have so much time devoted to action sequences leads to tighter storytelling and more room for subtlety than the White Elephant fluff of I Am the Night and It’s Never Too Late, I believe Feeding Time is the starting point for a new kind of dramatically null fireworks approach to episode production that would plague both Superman and Batman Beyond.

The screenplay for Feeding Time is interchangeable with any barebones revenge story scripting exercise about a pathetic, socially inept man who stumbles into an accident that endows him with superpowers, which in turn drive him to enact revenge on everyone in close proximity, so that they may feel the pain he had endured for so many years. This description not only relays basic plot information; it more or less relays the entire story. One may recall Jervis Tetch’s introspective transformation from jittery, bashful, bucked tooth romantic to obsessive control freak, provoked not by any one catalyst, but by a combination of oppressive managerial hierarchy, social insufficiency, and his own research expertise in neurological manipulation. Rudy Jones lacks any such nuance; he is a prototype. He is not believable as a smalltime janitor compelled to work for an egocentric criminal higher-up to get ahead in life. Biographical information about him is crudely disclosed in a first act police scuffle that leads to a chemical vat rupture within minutes.

It becomes clear that his lifelong subjugation and timidity is only necessary insofar as it serves as a basic motivation for sudden super-villainy. Upon fusing with the unspecified purple goop, he becomes the Parasite, a monster with the ability to leech powers and memories from his opponents. Not only is this power unable to be viewed under any kind of thematic lens (transfer of power, parasitism on larger systemic levels, the moral and psychological implications of memory theft, etc.), but as a villain he lacks any objective outside of a general desire to wreak havoc out of some misguided attempt at abstract vengeance (awkwardly elucidated in one of Superman’s you-don’t-have-to-do-this outbursts). It’s clearly an episode for the fight scenes alone.

The first episode in a while to be animated by Dong Yang, Feeding Time is full of blocky movements, iffy poses, and unconvincingly directed violence. When Superman comes at Parasite with a streetlight, instead of going the rational rote and using its verticality to strike from a distance, he holds it parallel to the ground and thrusts it forward with both hands. When Parasite goes in to strike Superman, a shot of him preparing a powerful hit cuts to a confounding long shot that weakly matches the action. Colors are also more muddled than TMS’s palette of appropriately saturated hues and carefully chosen contrasts.

The only worthwhile aspects of Feeding Time are the continuity linkages, the most important of which is Superman’s kryptonite protection suit.

S:TAS reviews: A Little Piece of Home

If Superman: the Animated Series is the least anthological series in the DCAU, excepting Justice League Unlimited (though I might argue that the continuity threads in Superman are far more subtly interwoven), then A Little Piece of Home is one of the most economic exhibitions of how it maintains its sense of progression even in episodes with no obvious continuity links. It is both a taut stand-alone introduction to Superman’s notorious Achilles Heel and a building block that ever so slightly develops character relationships even as it expands the breadth of Metropolis.

To critically demonstrate the wealth of connections and developments packed into this singular installment is to note three areas, each inseparable from the other two, which make its twenty-two minutes a treasure trove. The first is the basic narrative, that of how Luthor discovers he has Superman’s weakness in his possession and how he subsequently uses it for his own ends. The second is the specific happenings and character interactions that flesh out the larger Superman mythology and at certain points further the story as well. The third is the aesthetic aspects of production, music and art design, that both enhance the experience and offer telling tidbits of information.

The basic narrative structure begins with Superman’s inability to apprehend two museum thieves because of the inadvertent presence of Kryptonite in one of the exhibits. Luthor makes use of his newfound discovery in order to defeat Superman, at first luring him to an abandoned construction zone via hired lackeys and later luring him to the original museum via deception. In the meanwhile, Lois obtains a sliver, which she shares with Clark Kent out of newspaper fascination and then later with Professor Emile Hamilton of STAR Labs, who finds out how to shield Superman from its radiation. Already can be seen recurrent images of Luthor manipulating events from the shadows, ever with hidden cameras at his disposal. The parallel between the first heist and Luthor’s commissioned heist ironically suggests Luthor’s criminality. And a seemingly inconsequential scene that has Lois distractedly shooting crumpled up paper into the wastebasket reemerges to become the central climactic reversal of fortune.

But the minor character details further enrich the tale. The opening press conference has Lois questioning Luthor about how his museum may serve as one of his company’s tax shelters, continuingly hammering in both Lois’s fearlessness and her past relationship with him. Mercy Graves, Luthor’s bodyguard, displays her tendency to launch from silent obeisance to fierce athletic finesse in an offhand comedic moment and remains a central figure throughout the story without ever being insisted upon as such. Superman’s rescue at Lois’s hands leads to a quick exchange between the two that suggests the permanence of their now established relationship. And of course Superman’s facing down Luthor both harkens back to The Last Son of Krypton and keeps afloat in the viewer’s memory the particular nature of their dynamic.

The aesthetic qualities enhance the thematic significance of some of these observations. For instance the brassy jazz music gives the second-act currency heist the ring of a traditional high-excitement genre film. Given the relative blandness of the episode’s first heist, this musical seasoning can be viewed as a means of calling attention to the greater competence and resourcefulness of Luthor’s operations relative to those of other small-time hoodlums. In the same sequence, the establishing shot of the construction site contains a sign in the bottom right corner that reveals the building to be a LexCorp apartment complex, reaffirming again the idea that Luthor’s grasp extends to most areas of Metropolis and in keeping with the museum opening the notion that perhaps it’s an entirely self-serving operation. Other designs, those of the agent’s high-rise penthouse apartment and the diner that serves as a meeting place for Lois and Clark, maintain an architectural continuity for Metropolis (high ceilings, wide windows, and art deco sensibilities) in the case of the former and suggest atypical locales in the case of the latter.

Of course the most obvious bit of continuity is the foreshadowing at the end, announcing loud and clear that there will always be more ammunition for Luthor as long as he has his paws on everything from city engineering to archaeological excavations.

S:TAS reviews: Fun and Games

If The Last Son of Krypton was a sweeping epic intended to establish the major benchmarks of the Superman mythos, then Fun and Games is a more focused episode that gets into series routine. The first villain-of-the-week story, it boasts perhaps the most psychologically complex of Superman’s rogues gallery, a man whose human vulnerability, juvenile fixations, and unusual crimes set him up for knee-jerk psychoanalytical evaluations from tabloid shrinks, but also for very real and well earned pathos.

Toyman most certainly harkens back to Batman’s rogues gallery, but it is worth noting the differences between Metropolis and Gotham in how each city reacts to antisocial deviants. Gotham specializes in perturbed individuals; it is in its most harrowing portrayals a ghastly, crime-ridden No Man’s Land that houses its expressionistic monsters in a castle on a hill. Metropolis, a larger-than-life metropolitan haven, overlooks the threat of the silly little man, and Lois’ reactionary fluff piece about him is symptomatic of this big-city expedience. It is of course telling that her callousness in pursuing a sensational story leads to her capture.

Another curiosity is that the writers don’t play the sympathy card for Toyman, and yet sympathy is what naturally follows (Lois can’t help but feel sorry for him in spite of her kidnapping). He is intended to make the viewer squirm, dressed as a doll and voiced by an uncomfortably sinister Bud Cort. He elicits a horrific kind of infantilism and is jarringly frightening as he slowly hobbles forward to meet his victims. And yet a fervent telling of his story, that of the fatherless boy with no childhood, makes him understandable in the vein of Clayface or Mr. Freeze, and just as in Feat of Clay and Heart of Ice, the true villain is a grubby, contemptuous opportunist.

It is the lack of pause for psychological dramatizations—Toyman’s storybook scene is intercut with essential exposition—that keeps Fun and Games a vibrant Superman story and not a return to the ground already covered in Batman. While Toyman is an understandable adversary afflicted with psychological pain and suffering, he remains a demonic abstraction whose shattered mask at the end recalls the ending of Read My Lips in its foreboding. Since his complex is more implied than extensively dwelt upon, the rest of Fun and Games allots time to wickedly fun action scenes that utilize explosive physics and a wide variety of new environments.

A lot of the visual extravagance is owed to TMS, which not only animates roughly a third of all Superman episodes, but which also assigns direction to an in-house professional. The studio’s trademark qualities can be glimpsed all over, from the way the armored car briefly pauses going into a sharp turn before careening forward at a deafening speed to the slow motion shots of floating debris that follow the cannonball impact of Toyman’s accelerating bouncy ball on warehouse crates and wall generators.

By the end of Fun and Games, perhaps most importantly we get an idea of how the most physically frail of villains can pose a threat to Superman, a hero many frown upon for his immense physical strength. In each individual skirmish we see him not only dealing with weird anomalies like skin-digesting goo, but also having to account for his alter ego when a telephone booth isn’t nearby.

S:TAS reviews: The Last Son of Krypton

If Batman tackles individual case studies, the minutia of systems, be they mob rackets or the criminal mind, then Superman is about larger abstracts. His series consists of thematic and continuity threads that interweave to create a grand illustration of a mythological world, with arguably more depth and immensity than the densely layered sociological web that is Gotham City. In The Last Son of Krypton, not only are we introduced to essential supporting characters and carefully cultivated relationships, but we are also subject to a broad panorama of the major themes at work, ranging from science fiction to global politics.

If part one is on one hand a condensed space opera that begins the saga of Superman, then it is on another the seeding ground for grand dichotomies and rich allusions that are to permeate the remainder of the series. Bruce Timm has discussed the effort to create a more organic Krypton than the cold, deliberately alien world of previous adaptations. This Krypton is a hybrid of natural landscapes—an arctic subterranean dwelling place, luminous purple skies and soft turquoise greenery—and advanced technology—hologram projectors, space ships, and a ubiquitous supercomputer who is clearly intended to evoke HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey lore (note as well that Brainiac’s cavernous hub bears some resemblance to HAL’s artificially lit information databank).

If Jor-El is the good guy and Brainiac the bad, then it is worth noting that Jor-El’s accurate information comes from direct probing of Krypton’s surface, a direct physical contact with the natural world. It is the mechanistic Brainiac that misleads, and a dependence on him that marks Krypton’s downfall. One need only examine part two to see this duality resurface. Clark Kent calls two places his home, the rustic quietude of Smallville and the bustling technological Metropolis. It is also pertinent that the Midwestern farm villa is where Clark is grounded in family and morals. Metropolis is a land of corrupt businessmen, political underhandedness, and frequently malfunctioning machines. This opposition between the organic and the inorganic is not simply an aloof dynamic; it explains a great deal why the unhampered physicality of Superman clashes so strikingly with the tacit near-dictatorship of Luthor, whose power stems directly from mechanically expedient transactions and an inhuman compartmentalizing of Metropolis’ citizens. The Lexo-Skel Suit 5000 can also be viewed as a detrimental integration of man and machine.

Another theme that spans all three parts is that of political strife. Part one is about an enclosed council and part three a global network. The homogenous elite of Krypton is hindered by groupthink and self-denial. Politics on earth comprises iffy international relations and diplomacy breaches. Each is a broad view of a basic and generally unpreventable political ill. What further defines Superman as a hero besides his concentrated symbolism and pure morality is that he exists outside of politics. In the future some of his gung-ho breaching of certain international barriers creates havoc, but in The Last Son of Krypton we see this valuing of the common good over the difficulties of proper diplomacy as a great virtue. He is unafraid of directly confronting corporate greed or political corruption, and it is this boldness that solidifies him as a populist hero, the antithesis of Batman, whose similar transgressions are grim vigilante exploits.

What completes The Last Son of Krypton, beyond the grandiose thematic elements, are the little details that anticipate future developments and further develop the lush world of Metropolis (and Smallville for that matter). Rarely is dialogue so expertly written and performed than when it is assigned to Lois Lane, a hard-edged opportunistic newspaperwoman with a penchant for playful cynicism. The query as to what could have saved a girl from a thirty-story fall is met with “friendly pigeons,” she pins down Superman as the “Nietzschean fantasy ideal all wrapped up in a red cape,” and Clark Kent, who in his coy small-town charm becomes Lois’s chief competition, is indefinitely billed as Smallville. Lois is not only central to the Superman mythos in every traditional sense, but she also represents The Daily Planet in all its slick big-city efficiency and provides invaluable connections to characters ranging from man-on-the-wharf Bibbo to Luthor himself.

Brainiac’s status as one of Superman’s three major arch nemeses is planted on Krypton, not only giving him archetypal associations with inhuman technology, but also intertwining him permanently with Superman’s biological identity. John Corben, introduced as the man in the Lexo-Suit is to reappear later as recurrent villain Metallo, and Lana Lang, who appears briefly as one of Clark’s high school chums, will prove a rather important link to his adolescence and a bridge between his two personas. Even more in-depth: an offhand comment about the Phantom Zone, a passing mention of STAR Labs, and a surprisingly well-integrated allusion to Batman.

Artistic flourishes breathe life into each of the three major worlds presented us. Krypton is designed not to be noticeably otherworldly, but to carry certain earthlike attributes, starting at the sweeping landscapes and ending at the small domestic details of the home of Jor-El and Lara. Clark’s first flight is embellished against a lavish nighttime canvas that presents Smallville’s starlit beauty in grand panoramic detail, the sequence in its entirety a wondrous illustration of a perfect ephemeral moment. Metropolis’ immensity can be glimpsed in both exteriors, which depict monolithic art-deco skyscrapers and layers upon layers of elevated thoroughfares, and building interiors, which have impossibly high ceilings and intricate glass windows that take up full wall spaces. The climactic fight scene sends Superman and his opponent barreling through various destructible environments, marking Metropolis itself as an expansive battleground.

The Last Son of Krypton could not be a better introduction to Superman’s near-endless universe, which begins in Metropolis and extends to the far reaches of the cosmos. It is a story both rushed and fastidious, one that finds the time for both an iconic face-to-face confrontation between Superman and his most ruthless opponent and a quick gag involving Bibbo’s impulsive fixation on an alluring vending machine. If Superman is so often irrationally dismissed for being the least edgy of all superheroes, then Timm, Dini and Burnett are to be commended for not only openly embracing the Big Blue Boy Scout with bombastic vigor, but for also fleshing out his world beyond the obvious symbols and icons that usually populate his stories. In a mere three parts we are introduced a mythology more vibrant and textured than any in the DC Animated Universe, helmed by the greatest of all superheroes.

Batman and Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero

Mr. Freeze’s tragic five-part tale is the closest the masterminds behind the DC Animated Universe came to a fully fleshed out character arc. When Dini risked continuing his story in Deep Freeze after his introduction in Heart of ice, a glistening masterpiece of deft narrative structure and ambitious tragic overtones, Freeze became a character that would be brought back again in The New Batman Adventures, as well as the futuristic Batman Beyond. Sub-Zero, a sixty-minute film released exclusively on video, must be evaluated as part of the character’s five-part saga, but at the same time it remains an extended feature of stand-alone status. In its length, that of three individual installments, it ran the gamut of potential overindulgence, a fate that befell Mask of the Phantasm.

The crucial problem of Sub-Zero is that its story carries the same wallop as a Deep Freeze, but takes far too long to achieve its inevitable effect, dabbling in pointless secondary characters, establishing Gotham City for DCAU virgins, and indulging CGI set pieces now unfortunately dated. The first fifteen minutes, close to a quarter of the film, consist of a lengthy credits sequence that dissolves into a lengthy introduction culminating in the destruction of Nora’s cryogenic chamber, an obligatory sequence in which Batman and Robin apprehend a criminal, and a socialite banquet that conjoins the major supporting characters. Whatever the aesthetic high points found here, the sepia humidity of midday Gotham bleeding into a dark-blue world of alleyways and close-knit buildings that collectively block out all sunlight, a tonal association between the cold palette of the chase sequence and the earlier arctic shrine of Freeze and his indigenous pal Kunac, and the painstaking effort put into crafting individualized banquet patrons (Kirkland’s design work may be the film’s strongest attribute), it mostly proves dull and wasteful.

Soon it becomes apparent that Kirkland’s dreams are even loftier than merely attempting to sustain an extended Freeze story. This is also part of the Barbara Gordon character arc—by some perfect coincidence she becomes Freeze’s primary target when her blood type is found to match Nora’s. Her presence is troubling to say the least. The only character development involves implied information about her relationship with Dick Grayson, which began sometime before the events of the film; Kirkland spends time fleshing out their curious courtship (swing dancing is involved) before Barbara is degradingly reduced to the unflattering position of damsel-in-distress. The centerpiece in this transition from slice of college of life to boring action narrative is a bravura chase sequence, well directed but thinly disguised as a further elongation of the already heavily padded story.

The next phase consists of Bruce and Dick sleuthing around while Barbara tries to evade Freeze and Belson, the self-centered doctor who is to administer the organ transplant. The chase around the oilrig supplies one slight instance of exposition (Barbara finds out what she’s there for) and several minutes of tiresome time-consumption. Freeze is little more than a knee-jerk reactionary who must be kept in check by Belson; the two are a bumbling duo of sorts, and Freeze comes out looking foolish and irrational, his endangerment of the woman who is to save his wife utterly implausible. Even worse is that the only way Kirkland assure us of Freeze’s credibility as a human being is through Kunac’s presence as the man’s adopted son (never mind that only a few seconds in the first few scenes and at the end are allotted to Freeze expressing anything other than bestial fury). The best Batman stories are those that have a greater repository of possible resolutions than one, and while Nora’s death remains a lingering possibility, we know for certain that Barbara is not going to be part of the surgical procedure. The tension does not register when the structure is anything but taut and so much time is wasted on non-essentials.

The finale pops and sizzles like any action-packed finale should. Beautifully animated explosions and chases and skirmishes adorn the climax, a visually festive but thematically boring way to go out. It is merely an extension of the set pieces already put together by Kirkland and crew, and fails to offer any character-driven moments of desperation or motivation outside of the most obvious and endlessly clarified—Dick likes Barbara, Freeze loves Nora, and Batman is heroic. Freeze remains an angry, underdeveloped loose canon till he is buried under slabs of rubble, at which point he becomes a poor, whimpering weakling pleading wide-eyed for Nora.

The very ending informs us that Nora has been successfully revived, making me doubt Freeze’s refusal to submit her to hospital care. In a way this conveniently optimistic conclusion renders the entirety of Sub-Zero frustratingly worthless. Freeze spent an angry hour’s worth of filmic narration trying to save his wife’s life via illegal organ transplant, only for her to be saved under regular hospital care, much to his teary-eyed relief. My gut reaction is one of relief as well, as the isolated minute that relays Freeze’s peaceful fulfillment is a beautiful one independent of context. If Timm and his crew hurtled Mr. Freeze back into the realm of tragedy come Cold Comfort, I imagine it is because the rest of Sub-Zero was too sloppy to mark the true end of his story.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is an enormous curiosity for several reasons. It is a 70-minute story with bloated ambition that boasts a foray into the origin of Batman, something unexplored in the animated series aside from the occasional allusion to the night of his parents’ deaths. Furthermore, it skirts the line between modest continuation of the series and bombastic big-screen production. It was not always intended for theatrical release, but its widescreen presentation, heavy symbolism, and melodramatic score all seem like steps forward in an attempt to be more cinematic than the twenty-two minute serials. The ideas that ground Phantasm are grandiose ones, and the film’s development of its central character and attempts at enriching the Batman mythos are its greatest attributes. It is the pandering to a wider audience through callow stylistics and soapy melodramatics that I find disappointing.

A long time ago, Bruce Wayne wasn’t an omniscient guardian of a dreary war zone of a city. His playboy image was still a façade, but he had no Batman into which to pour his ideal persona. In both present and flashback scenes, Bruce’s dilettante life-management is shown to be hopelessly shallow and wholly unconcerned. While usually we are led to believe that this is simply because Bruce Wayne is a constructed image and Batman is what deserves the man’s time, the opening scenes of Phantasm suggest a romantic tragedy that killed off a socially active Wayne forever and perhaps doomed him to a bitter crime fighting existence. We see via flashback that even though Bruce was on the path to dissociate himself from the world and take up the fight against crime, he was also rendered vulnerable by a woman who cared little for Bruce the playboy and had the humor and audacity to express her irreverence for his billionaire lifestyle.

The implication is that only a woman who could pierce through Bruce’s forced social role and detect something deeper is the only woman who might have ever won his heart. There then ensues a dilemma for Bruce, gradually unfolded over multiple flashbacks, over whether to be happy and seek a relationship or to bind himself to the dismal oath he swore upon his parents’ murder. Most Batman stories are tragic, and thusly Andrea left Bruce just as marriage became a possibility for them. The present-tense story events are allotted to a less complicated doppelganger plot. Upon confronting the imposter, Batman gets at the heart of what happened many years ago. We find that Andrea has taken on a morbid vengefulness, a vice ever ubiquitous in the Batman universe, and that the ever-elusive figure of the Joker ties everything together. The themes of futile oaths, dual identities, family tragedies, and isolation are interlocked and present in both Bruce and Andrea; this bleak reality of familial duty and psychological anguish prevents any chance of love.

But in every artistic endeavor unassociated with writing or immediate storyboarding, Phantasm demonstrates one of the key strengths of the twenty-two minute anthology: with less time to tell a story there is also less room to be showy. Phantasm’s first central flaw is structural, that of the misplaced expositional flashbacks. In many ways these glimpses of the past are the dramatic high points of the story, but there is no rhyme or reason to their placement or runtime; they are triggered by imposing icons or introspective close-ups, cued by a choral sound transition that seems straight out of an exotic Powell and Pressburger movie, and then they seem to meander along to arbitrary cutoff points.

One-note characterizations could have gotten by in the show, but in a feature-length movie they are almost inexcusable. The mob boss Valestra wears a black pinstripe suit, comes equipped with a pointed mustache and a thing for cigar smoke, and is voiced by Abe Vigoda, a typecast Italian mobster if there ever was one. Senator Arthur Reeves is unbearable in his pursed lipped urbanity, replete with arched eyebrows, slicked hair, an angled nose, and condescending posturing. While Vigoda’s gangster slides by with his minimal plot importance, Reeves is a cornerstone—he once worked for Andrea’s father, has mob connections, and influences police initiatives. He is an omnipresent roadblock that jars all of the scenes he factors into with his gaudy mannerisms.

The film having been a mass collaborative effort, there seems to have been no restrictions on the number of glossy flourishes to drape on a film already cluttered with narrative strands. Operatic syrup is smothered on in heavy doses. Soap opera dialogue, iconographic exploitation, and an obtrusive score become manipulative crutches. All evocations of Bruce’s parents must be blatant, either a low-angle centered shot of his parents’ tombstone or a composition that frames him as a small man in the shadow of their mounted portrait. Most of the big reminiscence scenes abuse the organ for its grave intonations. Aside from some of Andrea’s witty one-liners, her romantic dialogue with Bruce is run-of-the-mill, unnecessarily assisted by grating sentimental music. She also makes one too many statements about Batman’s parental vows, each intended as a dramatic, caustic reprimand.

I do have an affinity for the metaphorical presence of the retro World of the Future. It suggests that the gritty 1940s Gotham of present is a regression from a 1950s domestic optimism, its ruins standing for the decay of both the city itself and the protagonists’ relationship. Joker inhabits the House of Tomorrow with deliberate mockery, his marriage to the robotic housewife a mechanical perversion of the human love sought after unsuccessfully by Bruce and Andrea. The tattered Gotham fair is the third act battleground; on its hallowed ground, Andrea reveals herself to be Phantasm, Batman and his arch-nemesis fight as giants in a miniature city, and the Joker blows everything to smithereens, mirroring Andrea’s decision to take the final step into vengeful isolation.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm’s most important contribution to Batman: the Animated Series is its humanization of Bruce Wayne, achieved through expressive storyboarding and Conroy’s powerful vocal performance. The rest, for the most part, is all theatrics and melodrama. Watching it, I feel as if the creative staff is pleading on bended knee for an emotional reaction. There is an absence of narrative fluidity and emotional honesty that hinders it from the status of masterpiece, a title many fans are quick to assign it. But the commitment to a story defined more by characters than by physical action, however executed, as well as the construction of ambitious set pieces, demonstrates the boldness of Timm, Dini, Radomski and the rest of the creative higher-ups. This boundary pushing alone is on some level compensatory for the film’s overwrought storytelling, but as soon as the sappy love song starts over the end credits I realize that it’s far from enough.