Review of Batman: Gotham Knight (2008) by John B — 25 Jul 2018

There is a lot of good Batman content in this anthology; two of the shorts are especially great, showing his legend through the eyes of the children of Gotham and the hero's true superpower: his will.

Another is almost as good, showing the vigilante's growing relationship with the police. The other half are entertaining enough, if unremarkable, but the bigger problem is that while they all work well individually they suffer an identity crisis when put together.

That's not because they are too disparate; the variety in the different animation styles is a highlight and shows the versatility of the character, it's that they try to tie them together. While it's nice that each one picks up a thread from the previous one, not enough attention was paid to making them line up and it ends up feeling more disjointed than if the shorts were kept more separate.

Similarly, it purports to fit with Nolan's live action movies, it just about succeeds as regards the narrative situation, but it drops the ball on continuity details. Fortunately, this link is easily ignored, but it highlights how the film would have been better embracing one thing on another: either allowing the freedom to make the stories as different from each other as possible (it may have benefited from hiring different voice actors for each one as those used don't always fit) or make them a more uniform whole.

By not deciding what it wants to be or committing to one thing it becomes less than the sum of its parts.