Overview: Batman and his allies are thrust back in time to feudal Japan to face off against members of his Rogue’s Galery who have adjusted to their new time period, all while trying to figure out how to get back to their own time.
Synopsis (spoilers ahead): While battling Gorilla Grodd at Arkham Asylum, Batman is caught in Grodd’s Quake Engine time machine and transported to Feudal Japan. There, he is chased by samurai working for the Joker, who have orders to kill him. Escaping, Batman meets up with Catwoman, who had entered the timeline two years earlier. He learns from her that all of Gotham City’s top criminals have moved to Feudal Japan and become feudal lords after deceiving the Sengoku daimyō, battling each other until only one state remains. In order to stop the villains from changing history, Batman and Catwoman must get to the Quake Engine in Arkham Castle. Batman also finds Alfred and sees that he has the Batmobile in tow.
When the Joker’s troops ambush the hideout, Batman storms his way through Arkham Castle, which transforms into a giant mecha. As Batman confronts the Joker, he is forced to leave and save a mother and child below from being crushed by the robot’s hand. His Bat-Pod transforms into an armored suit, fighting a sumo Bane while trying to stop the robot hand, only for the mother to reveal herself as Harley Quinn and get the drop on him. As Joker’s minions surround Batman, he is suddenly whisked away by ninjas led by Eian of the Bat Clan of Hida. He learns that the Bat Clan helped Nightwing, Red Hood, Robin, and Red Robin upon their arrival and that the clan had followed a prophecy of a foreign bat ninja restoring order to the land. Robin gives Batman an invitation from Grodd to a nearby hot spring. There, Grodd explains that he intended to send the villains far away so he could take Gotham for himself, but Batman’s interference sent them all to Feudal Japan instead. Batman and Grodd agree to work together to return to Gotham.
Batman, Grodd, Catwoman, the Robins, and the Bat Clan battle the Joker and his forces by the river. They defeat the Joker and Harley, but Grodd turns on Batman, revealing his alliance with Two-Face before the Joker and Harley escape and blow up their own ship, taking Batman down with it. Having captured a power converter from Harley, Catwoman attempts to bargain with Grodd in bringing her back to Gotham; however, they need to obtain other power converters from Penguin, Poison Ivy, and Deathstroke to complete the Quake Engine.
Days later, Batman recovers from his injuries from the explosion and trains the Robins to learn the ways of the ninja in order to beat Grodd. Red Hood finds the Joker and Harley and attempts to kill them, but Batman discovers that they lost their memories from the explosion and are living their lives as farmers. One month later, the villains mobilize their castle robots for battle at Jigokukohara, the field of hell. Batman leads the Robins and the Bat Clan into the battlefield. After defeating the other villains, Grodd puts them under his mind control, with the intent of ruling the country himself. The Joker and Harley, however, crashes his party from above, reclaiming their castle from Grodd. The Bat-Family saves Catwoman and Grodd before the Joker merges all of the castles into the super robot Lord Joker. An injured Grodd gives Batman control of his army of monkeys, and Robin enables them to merge into one giant samurai monkey to battle the Joker’s robot. The samurai monkey then combines with a swarm of bats to form the Batgod (in the image of the Bob Kane’s Golden Age Batman) to defeat Lord Joker before the Bat-Family storm into the castle to battle the villains. The Joker reveals to Batman that as farmers, he and Harley planted special flowers that triggered their memories back once they bloomed. As the castle burns, Batman and the Joker engage in a sword fight. Ultimately, Batman defeats the Joker.
With the villains defeated, Feudal Japan has been restored to its original state and the Bat-Family take the villains back to the present day. Catwoman sells weapons and furniture from the castle robots to an antique shop, stating that she never forgets to look out for herself.
Analysis: Japan has always expressed a deep appreciation for American Super Heroes. Though the country is filled with more than their fair share of superpowered franchises including various Super Sentai series’, manga and anime properties, there is a history – however little known – of popular comic book heroes translated and re-branded through adaptation. One example is Spider-Man; having not only been prolific on a Japanese Live-Action show summoning a giant mecha, but portrayed in other alternate versions such as the manga series from the early 1970s by Ryuichi Ikegami, a number of fighting games developed by CAPCOM, and part of the Marvel Mangaverse line of comics in the early 2000s. The 1992 X-Men animated series was dubbed with two entirely different opening sequences, fitting closer to a high-jumping action series than the stilted and stiff version the show that most people remember. Even as recent as 2014, Toei Animation developed a series titled Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers, an anime series that delved in game-system storytelling mechanics akin to Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Monster Rancher and others from the early 2000s.
This is to say nothing of Batman’s many interpretations in Japan. The Batman manga of the 1960s by Jiro Kuwata has been translated and available for purchase in America for some time now (and was adapted/parodied in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode “Batman’s Strangest Cases!”). Batman: Gotham Knight was one of the earlier animated DC films, released in 2008 in anticipation of the release of The Dark Knight. One of the lesser discussed, but by no means, unmentionable stories was Batman: Child of Dreams by Kia Asamiya. That story was a love-letter from one Bat-Fan overseas, as it depicted his classic Rogues Gallery, references to the 1989 film (which Asamiya in the afterword admits was an obvious influence), and whose central character was a Batman-Fan from Japan.
There’s an advantage to seeing familiar characters presented through unfamiliar lenses, and it’s led to some truly memorable iterations, demonstrating the malleability of the properties no matter what the setting. There’s a truism; an essential core of the characters that’s kept in check, but molded into new facets and thrown against sharp-edged walls to see how well they stick. Luckily for Batman Ninja, the source material is some sturdy stuff, as it sticks the landing against the spikey wall of Feudal Japan handily. As a result, this is one of the least pretentious Batman stories ever and a deliriously entertaining romp from start to finish.
The essentialism is in the characters. There’s no established time-stamp for this continuity outside of some obvious hints that don’t need great exploration. For instance, Catwoman knows Batman’s identity (as she infrequently does). Red Hood, Red Robin, and Damian’s presence marks this as a decidedly “current” Batman story, told explicitly within the lines of the past ten years, yet there are no references to events such as “Death in the Family”, “Under the Red Hood”, “Batman RIP” or “Hush”. And there doesn’t need to be. The characters are present in so far as their relationship to Batman provides them with simple roles to fill. Aside from Catwoman, there isn’t too much in the way of characterization, though everyone has a small moment to indicate that they’re definitively Jason Todd or Tim Drake. The one glaring exception is Damian, who fills the “Robin” role with a Xeroxed sense of lightheartedness and uplift that is in no way like his character from anything else. The closest he resembles in that of Spirtle from the Speed Racer series, as he develops a weird friendship with a communicative monkey. Nevertheless, the essentialism is best embodied by Catwoman, who helps Batman in one scene and messes him over the next. Neither hero nor villain, this version plays things pretty coy until the heat is on, and even then can always be counted on to watch out for herself when it suits her. Continuing the relating to other characters from anime, I thought back to Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, particularly in the last scene.
But the character simplicity multiples with the villains. Most of them don’t have too much to do but still add much by their colorful presences. Deathstroke, for one, is hardly defined by anything aside from his costume and use of guns (he’s generally a swordsman, something that would’ve been fun to see played up), but there’s one scene where he has a pretty woman on his arm as he’s consolidating his power, reflecting of Slade Wilson’s alpha-male status that has carried throughout his history. Other characters have small but telling flourishes. Penguin re-employs his rocket-launcher-armed penguins from Batman Returns. Poison Ivy has razor-toothed plant monsters. Two-Face’s mecha switches between good and evil with the flip of a coin, as well as an actual switch. Again, the villains are mostly here for color, but their colors are so bright it adds to the mix instead of subtracts. And as the world of anime takes over their motivations (explained somewhat by Grodd’s mind control), they fall into outrageous anime supervillain tropes, screaming at the top of their lung as their giant robots go on the attack. They’re still themselves, even if they’re acting wacky as hell.
This extends to its apex with Batman and the Joker. In the first act, Batman’s technology and gadgets are as futuristic as anything I’ve ever seen (making me think this could potentially take place two to three years in the future, as some of the characters such as Damian looked a bit older than traditionally drawn). The Batmobile turns into the Batwing, then pops into the Bat-Pod and finally makes a Bat-Armor right out of Genesis Climber Mospeda. He has holographic technology similar to the kind Robin used in the Young Justice cartoon, but on a much larger scale. Once all of his tech is stripped away, he’s forced to look inside himself and embrace the elemental and totemic warrior he embodies. Not the deepest of character conflicts, but for the setting, it works. It also achieves a small arc for Batman that doesn’t involve him being unlikable or self-important, which is all too common in modern western stories.
As for the Joker, he’s pretty standard when it comes to how he’s depicted. Manic, violent, malevolent while at times goofy. His mid-movie subplot about losing his memories goes nowhere after the single scene it occurs (although it’s a great introductory scene for Red Hood – who up to that point I was wondering about his whereabouts – as it displays his violent inclinations and ideological differences from Batman in a brutal fashion), but what I latched onto with both him and Harley were their slickly evil character designs. Takashi Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, went to the extreme with every design, and that’s no better presented than with Joker and Harley Quinn. Okazaki understood how two utterly reprehensible people will never stop grinning at their own horrific actions, and kept that quality throughout the film. And I’m including Harley intentionally, as this is the most villainous take on her I’ve seen in a long time. She doesn’t do much that the Joker doesn’t do, but their relationship is almost symbiotic in how one is rarely without the other. Harley is as messed up as Joker, and in every scene, she revels in the chaos and destruction they both cause. In an era where the character is known to a large tenant of young fans as a silly hero in DC Super Hero Girls, this was a welcome change of pace. Not that I personally dislike the more popular, anti-heroic Harley, but this nature of gleeful complicity was something that hasn’t been seen since Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, incidentally one of the darkest Batman stories ever told.
That’s what carries Batman Ninja throughout two-thirds of its running time, the new takes on old concepts and familiar characters. The animation by the studio Kamikaze Douga is jaw-dropping, starting with an incredible panoramic shot of Batman dodging falling debris at Arkham Asylum, and never letting up with detail and verve through every explosive action-packed sequence. A real feast for the eyes, the designs alone are worthy of their eventual overpriced Yamato Works figurines or even perhaps Funko Pops if this proves popular enough. The final thirty minutes are unbelievable, and, to some, will certainly be downright ridiculous. But the Silver-Age nature of where the story went in terms of high-octane climaxes go made me appreciate and enjoy it even more. This is a film that knows what it wants to be, knows the characters and doesn’t push too hard against either to accomplish something that’s never been seen before, even in Japanese Batman media content. If there’s one thing everyone says about the character, it’s that he can fit into any different take or version and work. That truism applies itself here, and in a thoroughly enjoyable way.
Final Thoughts: While some story turns might be too convenient or even wacky, the sheer conviction the film had kept it going for me until the credits rolled. Time will tell, but this is the best Batman-related film in the DC direct-to-video cache since Under the Red Hood.
Editor’s Note: Batman Ninja is now available on Digital HD, Blu-ray DVD, and DVD. You can order your copy and help support TBU in the process by heading over to Amazon and ordering yours now.
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