Under The Red Hood Gets Under Our Skin

I have no qualms watching animation while my wife is in the room, yet I'll sometimes get strange looks when I’m watching cartoons.

There’s a clear difference in my mind. Animation is art – impressionistic drawn/programmed imagery representing a world impossible to photograph. Cartoons are Saturday Morning Apple Jacks fodder.

At first glance, the newest DC Animated feature Batman: Under the Red Hood might seem to be in this second camp (so much so that my wife rolled her eyes and left to go watch Bravo in the other room,) but patient viewers will recognize enough representative subtleties to take the straight-ahead narrative and professional voice work over the top. The common, unbiased person will see this as “a real movie.” A DC Universe fan will lose his friggin’ mind.

Red Hood takes the “Death in the Family” arc of Batman tales and blends it with a number of other elements to create a story that can very much stand on its own.

We open with The Joker beating the hell out of the second Robin (Jason Todd), Bats arriving too late to save him, then the eventual appearance of sociopathic vigilante (even by Batman’s standards) called Red Hood.

Visons of failure are around every corner, and Bruce Greenwood is able to evoke the stern-yet-weariness that is the Dark Knight Detective with even the tersest of dialogue. Dick Grayson, the first Robin and now grown up as Nightwing, is voiced very a bordering-on-fabulous Neil Patrick Harris, providing surgical strikes of enjoyment into the mix.

John DiMaggio (yes, Bender Bending Rodriguez), who has voiced DC characters before, takes a first stab at voicing The Joker. It is an interesting take – not quite as scenery-chewing as you might think. I knew it was DiMaggio when I popped the disc in, but completely forgot that as the closing credits rolled. I interpret that as success.

There was something else that hit as the closing credits rolled. I was amazed at just how much the movie “got me.” It is a true tragedy – proving once again that Batman must always keep himself distant from the rest of humanity. Bats is finally asked a question we've all been asking for decades:  just what does he have to gain by letting Joker live?  More so than most of the DC Animated films, Red Hood aims for cinematic storytelling. There are montages and flashbacks that hardly spoon-feed the audience.

Red Hood may not be the best of these now eight collected DC Animated features (Batman: Gotham Knight is still the most visually innovative, Wonder Woman had enough pop for a theatrical release) but this may be the one with the most heart.