Am I the only one who stayed up to watch Under the Red Hood? I'd like to compare and contrast it with Batman Ninja, since their strengths and flaws complement each other.
As both Kitschensyngk and I noted, the story of Batman Ninja really feels like something a bunch of precocious kids threw together. It starts with a bizarre premise and just keeps piling on WTF moments until the very end. However, that craziness is what makes it so much fun to watch. Also, the idea that Joker can bring himself and Harley into and out of sanity a la Light Yagami is very provocative; the scene where they're innocent farmers and Batman, of all people, is willing to just leave them alone is actually touching.
Under the Red Hood goes in the opposite direction. No fun craziness here. The story it tells is (for the most part) logical, coherent, and utterly tragic. Any moment of happiness or humor is immediately undermined. Jason Todd is surrounded by characters who are either pure evil (Joker, Black Mask) or flawed but have good intentions (Batman tries to redeem Jason, Ra's al Ghul brings him back from the dead), but he betrays them all regardless. And his ultimate plan is to force Batman to break his moral code by killing Joker, instead of just doing it himself, because of his daddy issues. The result is that, as Batman himself notes, nothing changes; at the end, all the major players are alive and ready to resume their endless, hopeless struggle. Which I guess is the point.
So we have two well-made but flawed productions here. Batman Ninja is nonsensical but entertaining, while Red Hood has a stronger story, but that story is too relentlessly dark and nihilistic for me to enjoy it. The moral of this review: if you force me to choose, I'll take fun and crazy over logical but depressing, although the best approach is to find the middle ground between the two extremes.
P.S. About the Joker voices: neither of them worked for me, for opposite reasons. Tony Hale tries too hard to sound like Mark Hamill. And all due respect to John DiMaggio, but while I realize they were going for a different take on Joker here, he just sounds wrong with a deep baritone.
I only got to see Batman Ninja. Under the Red Hood was too late for me, but I've already watched it a few years ago and I can watch it On Demand later to refresh my memory. Batman Ninja was a weird experience. I genuinely wasn't sure what the movie was going to be. I thought it would just be about Batman set in ancient Japan, not a time travel story that made absolutely no sense.
I feel like I should have had more fun with this movie than I did. It wasn't bad, but I think it became too ridiculous and nonsensical for me to really get behind. The visuals and the character designs were really great. The art style changes for certain scenes were really beautiful. I think that they wanted to throw in as many of the Bat Family and Batman's Rouge Gallery in ancient Japan as possible and they figured out the details along the way. Part of the problem could have been that despite all of the ridiculous nonsense going all, they still kind of played it straight at the same time. Batman had his self doubt about what he is without his weapons and Red Hood tried to beat up what appeared to be Joker and Harley without their memories, but then Robin could also understand a small ape for reasons.
Clearly, I should have stopped questioning anything once they had giant robot fights with a hand waved explanation as to how they got them, apes forming a giant monkey, bats covering the giant monkey to make a giant Batman and Batman using Naruto style jutsus to create Batman out of bats. If I heard more about how bizarre this movie's plot was, I might have been more prepared for it. Most of the praise I've heard beforehand was on the movie's visuals. The ending did get a good laugh out of me though. Bruce going through the city in an old Japanese cart in the form of a car with a Batman logo on top was just funny. How could he keep a secret identity in-universe sticking out that much? Overall, it was a weird movie.
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