Inside DC’s animated multiverse

The studio’s animation game is on point, with shows like Batman and Harley Quinn testament to great writing, visuals and voice casts

The year’s concluding quarter is proving to be an action-packed one for DC Studios. The Penguin, their ‘prestige TV’ series with HBO starring Colin Farrell as the titular Batman villain, is being well-received by audiences and critics globally. Their biggest theatrical release of 2024, Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga as The Joker and Harley Quinn, respectively, just opened this week.

And with much less fanfare, DC’s animation wing has quietly been churning out high-quality fare of its own, most recently Brandon Vietti’s Watchmen: Chapter I, a 90-minute film adaptation of the first half of the 1987 graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Released on August 13, the film is a remarkably faithful adaptation of this ‘anti-superhero’ text, retaining a lot of Moore’s dialogue as well as Gibbons’ colour palette. Chapter I is the latest among a batch of engaging, genre-diverse animated films and TV shows from the DC universe.

The three-part film Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths (2024) used a classic comic book animation style to unfurl a thoughtful and surprisingly poignant ‘multiverse’ story. Batman: Caped Crusader (2024) is a 10-episode series with noir-style visuals and witty, laconic dialogue inspired by Frank Sinatra gangster movies and ‘hardboiled’ detective novels. Next month, we’ll see the fifth season of the much-loved animated series Harley Quinn (2019-present), a postmodern black comedy specialising in send-ups of the superhero genre.

Another Bruce at the helm

What is DC doing right with these products? In both the writing and the visual department, they have shown a willingness to take risks — and commit fully to the aesthetic-set decided upon for a story. Batman: Caped Crusader is filled with the kind of gorgeous ‘light-and-shadow’ shots that 1950s Hollywood was full of, the duelling characters’ shadows projected on a wall immediately behind the action. This is an old animation trick, by the way, to circumvent content regulations written for juvenile audiences. You can’t show brains being spattered on the ground in a child’s show, but with shadow-play you can mount an acceptable facsimile.

Harley Quinn, on the other hand, with its whacky characters and fast-paced repartee, is catering to a post-anime audience. It, therefore, uses the googly eyes, the zany sound effects, and the cartoonish displays of physical strength we associate with, say, Dragonball Z. It’s horses-for-courses storytelling and shows the confidence that DC has in these writers and animators.

It also helps that there’s an old hand pulling the strings: 90s animation mainstay Bruce Timm is the co-creator of Harley Quinn and the creator/showrunner of Batman: Caped Crusader. Timm was one of the people responsible for building DC’s animated stable from the ground up in the 90s and 2000s, with landmark shows such as Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995) and Batman Beyond (1999-2001). Among other things, these two TV shows gave us the wonderful Kevin Conroy as the voice of Batman.

Timm was the obvious choice to lead DC’s new era in more ways than one. He is a skilled illustrator and experienced comic book writer. In the mid-90s he won a bunch of comics awards for his work on that era’s Harley Quinn graphic novels. He knows these characters inside out and down the years, has demonstrated a great ear for punchy yet cerebral dialogue.

Nailing the voices

Finally, DC is putting together some great voice casts for these stories, with the main cast being especially well-chosen. Hamish Linklater’s mysterious-priest-role from the horror show Midnight Mass no doubt served as a template for his Batman voice in Caped Crusader, equal parts haunted and haunting.

Kaley Cuoco brought a sense of danger and mischief to the girl-next-door template in the comedy series The Big Bang Theory. To these ingredients, she adds a psychotic break as Dr Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn, the titular character in Harley Quinn. It is a tremendously subtle performance because while derangement is easily portrayed, it’s trickier to play a razor-sharp person actively embracing their delusions and hallucinations in real time.

The obvious accomplishments of these earlier stories notwithstanding, the arrival of Watchmen: Chapter I feels like a milestone for DC animation. This is a book that was considered unfilmable for many years because of its dark tone and convoluted, nihilistic storyline. Its writer, Moore, is famously not a fan of either of the two live-action adaptations in the past. I think he would be considerably happier with Chapter I, not least because every part of its storytelling hews closely to the horror-drama tone of the book. The sound effects are ominous, orchestral. The actors are sombre, even menacing, and the frames frequently symmetrical, much like illustrator Gibbons used symmetrical panels on either side of a double-spread in the book.

DC’s recent efforts are a showcase for the potential of the animated medium. At a time when the live-action superhero stories — especially those belonging to their arch-rivals Marvel — aren’t necessarily setting the box office on fire, DC animation is well-placed to scoop up audiences tired of templatised scripts and flat visuals.

The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.

Published - October 03, 2024 02:45 pm IST