Batman Ninja

Batman Ninja has quite weak plotting and terrible direction. It relies so much on action and it never becomes anything deeper than its initial concept on paper. But it's fun in well executed action scenes, the characters are solid, the score is cool and it's worth seeing for its animation alone which is absolutely impressive in its artistry, cool designs and anime style. It's literally a concept art brought to life which was intriguing to witness.

This movie runs like the cut scenes from a game like 'Justice League, gods among us' or the likes. The plot was good but dialog very poor and only used to string fight scenes together. In many ways it felt like an advert for all the various Anime formats crammed into one movie based on a popular western brand. In short I loved what the movie tried to do but the end result missed the mark. 4/10

The movie has some very awesome and interesting ideas, but unfortunately they are not executed or presented all that well. The story isn't very well written, the script / dialogue was weak, the animation didn't look very good, except in some moments and the music was forgettable. Batman and the Joker were the best characters in the entire movie, while the others were there, because it wouldn't be a Batman movie without them and there are some that i totally forgot they are in it, so of course they have to remind you that they exist. Sometimes there is some nice cinematography, but most of it didn't impress me. Those aspects have some small percent positives, but it's not enough to give it a good score. The only huge positives that i can give is that the acting was very good (if you watch it with japanese audio) and the sound was great, but thats it. Overall it's very disappointing in many ways.

Though voices are in good American English, this anime is done by the Japanese. I was expecting the usual high quality that I get from even average Japanese anime, but here I was disappointed.

What I felt was, the Japanese were instructed by the American DC people to make it salable globally, and so they created this anime with assumptions on what a global audience thinks like. And its a total mess.

Please don't see this. You have too many good anime and films out there that you can't finish in your lifetime.

Batman Ninja is an incredibly stylish and original anime that just so happens to feature Batman and co. While the animation occasionally falters and the English dub can best be described as 'serviceable', it succeeds at delivering an excellent and decidedly different animated Batman feature. I truly hope that DC will continue to deliver more animated features like Batman Ninja.

8/10

• Many of the lowest reviews on IMDB seem to take issue with the Japanese influences and the departure from the usual 'grounded' Batman universe(s). If you dislike Japanese media and/or can't handle a film that will greatly differ from popular Batman movies & source material, then this is not for you.