Batman Ninja

One of the oddest films I have ever seen hands down. I have no idea what was going on for majority of the film. The voice acting was pretty bad, and the animation was odd - the style changed so often I can't say if it was good or bad. Despite all of this I will not forget it - a recommendation if you're gonna watch with friends and not take it seriously, but it's not good.

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 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.

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.

I'm not someone who reviews films online, but this was so pitifully done that it deserves some criticism.

Given that anime is a visually-focused story telling medium, it can be expected that dialogue will rarely be taken seriously. Unlike western animation, scripts are usually only developed after the animation is complete. For this reason, WB allowed for the English language version to develop independently from the Japanese, expecting that doing so would ensure that the film was authentically Batman while allowing the animation team in Japan to focus on making an authentically anime creation of their own. However, the result is the most mindless Batman script ever created in an animated film. The animation has its moments, but is completely overshadowed by the dumbest and least observant Batman ever created. For the world's greatest detective to ask who a group of samurai wearing Joker masks are working for is just lazy storytelling. This Batman has none of the characteristics that make him an attractive character and the voice acting feals forced and overdone.

I never trust these types of crossover endeavors because they rarely allow for either medium's strengths to fully materialize. Reading that this was to be scripted independently in English made me curious to see if there would be some more substance to the story to go along with the flashy animation, but it's a hard pass. There's some chance that the Japanese version might make a little more sense, but I don't see how this poorly constructed story allows for much improvement. A hard pass.