Batman_Ninja_Poster Movies Reviews 

Batman: Ninja

By | May 8th, 2018
Posted in Movies, Reviews | % Comments

When Batman: Ninja was announced, it sounded like it could be a train wreck of epic proportions. But with each subsequent announcement, the film started looking better and better, from hiring some really great people to work on it, to that first trailer, which was stunning. The film drops today. Does it live up to the hype? Keep reading for our spoiler-free review.

Batman, one of the most popular fictional characters on the planet, has reached a plane that fellow works of fiction like Sherlock Holmes or Peter Pan or Dracula achieved: the ability to be dropped into any genre of fiction, and people will buy it. There have been Holmes comedies and Peter Pan as a vampire stories and sexy Dracula takes, and no one really bats an eye, pardon the pun. Batman is now at that level, and doesn’t need to have every appearance be an origin story, because everyone in the universe knows how he becomes Batman.

Because of that, I can make a statement that would have seemed utterly bizarre an unthinkable a few year ago: the two best Batman movies ever made are The Lego Batman Movie and Batman: Ninja.

No really, hear me out.

Both films put Batman in unfamiliar genres, but keep the most important and transcendent parts of his character alive and well. They work because they focus not on Batman, a brooding solo act, but on Bruce Wayne, a man in search of his family. Batman: Ninja has everything you’d want from a Batman film, and then some: a slew of villains, great action, a little romance. But it also has stuff you didn’t think you needed, like Robin’s pet monkey, or Alfred using a solid third of his screen time to talk about fish and tea.

And, most importantly, neither film is an origin story.

Batman: Ninja revolves around Batman and his cast of characters being transported to feudal Japan. The machinations of this time travel don’t really matter, and the film displays this almost instantly by having Batman appear two years later than the rest of the characters, and it is just chalked up to, “who knows how time travel works, amirite?” The film is all the better for it, as for this story, the time travel is simply the device to kickstart the story.

In the two years before Batman’s arrival, some of his rogues have taken over various territories of Japan, which they are able to do with relative ease, due to their technological know-how from being born hundreds of years later. Each feudal state has design characteristics of its conqueror, and they appear to be in a near-constant state of war. Batman finds himself in the middle of this, and spends the early part of the film trying to get his bearings.

And, as viewers, we, too, are getting our bearings early on in the film, as there is so much, visually, going on. The film acts as a primer on all things Japanese, from the various styles of animation used, to the bits of classic Japanese art that float through various frames (like “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”), to the tropes of anime being introduced to decidedly un-anime characters. If this film were produced by Americans, it would feel like a cheap pastiche of all things we Americans consider ‘essentially’ Japanese. It would be like if a Brazilian tried to make an American style action movie, and had everyone wearing flag bandannas and shooting machine guns all the time.

But because the film was made by predominantly Japanese filmmakers (like Afro Samurai‘s Takashi Okazaki and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure‘s Junpei Mizusaki), it doesn’t feel culturally restricted. How all the various parts fit together is something of a mystery, even after having watched the film. Sequences of washed out, almost water-color scenes rub up against Dragon Ball Z-ish battle introductions. There is more food talk than you’d think, again, from Alfred, and there are some other stereotypical anime features, like all the women having gigantic breasts.

But because Batman is dumped into this alien landscape, they can do a lot of interesting things with the character. Here, he uses his detective work, his preparedness, his technological savvy, and, most importantly, his ability to inspire others to do incredible things. But instead of that feeling like any old Batman story, the mix of the setting and the visual style makes everything seem much, much more fresh.

Add to that a really inventive score that, again, mixes many genres, some legitimately funny moments, and some amazing, surrealistic action sequences, and you’ve got a thoroughly enjoyable 85 minutes. There is something that feels really pure and honest about this film, even though it is clearly taking from a number of different sources. At its heart, it is still a Batman and Joker story, but it manages to avoid feeling anything other than inventive and new.


//TAGS | Movies

Brian Salvatore

Brian Salvatore is an editor, podcaster, reviewer, writer at large, and general task master at Multiversity. When not writing, he can be found playing music, hanging out with his kids, or playing music with his kids. He also has a dog named Lola, a rowboat, and once met Jimmy Carter. Feel free to email him about good beer, the New York Mets, or the best way to make Chicken Parmagiana (add a thin slice of prosciutto under the cheese).

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